Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

LWN

Syndicate content
LWN.net is a comprehensive source of news and opinions from and about the Linux community. This is the main LWN.net feed, listing all articles which are posted to the site front page.
URL: https://lwn.net
Updated: 19 min 31 sec ago

Purism’s Librem 5 phone starts shipping—a fully open GNU/Linux phone (Ars Technica)

Friday 27th of September 2019 07:23:46 PM
Ars Technica reports on the Librem 5 smartphone from Purism, which has begun shipping. The article provides an initial review of the phone, with pictures of the interface and hardware inside the case. "The Librem 5 is unlike anything else on the market. Not only is it one of the only smartphones on Earth that doesn't ship with Android, a fork of Android, or iOS—Purism's commitment to 100% open software, with no binary blobs, puts severe restrictions on what hardware it can use. Android's core might be open source, but it was always built for wide adoption above all else, with provisions for manufacturers to include as much proprietary code as they want. Purism's demand that everything be open means most of the major component manufacturers were out of the question. Perhaps because of the limited hardware options, the internal construction of the Librem 5 is absolutely wild. While smartphones today are mostly a single mainboard with every component integrated into it, the Librem 5 actually has a pair of M.2 slots that house full-size, off-the-shelf LTE and Wi-Fi cards for connectivity, just like what you would find in an old laptop. The M.2 sockets look massive on top of the tiny phone motherboard, but you could probably replace or upgrade the cards if you wanted."

How to contribute to Fedora (Fedora Magazine)

Friday 27th of September 2019 06:27:47 PM
Over at Fedora Magazine, Ben Cotton has an article on contributing to the Fedora distribution. Obviously, it is pretty Fedora-specific, but the general ideas can be applied to other distributions and/or projects. He lists several areas where contributors are needed—beyond just the obvious candidates: "Cooperative effort is a hallmark of open source communities. One of the best ways to contribute to any project is to help other users. In Fedora, that can mean answering questions on the Ask Fedora forum, the users mailing list, or in the #fedora IRC channel. Many third-party social media and news aggregator sites have discussion related to Fedora where you can help out as well."

[$] Fixing getrandom()

Friday 27th of September 2019 03:39:54 PM
A report of a boot hang in the 5.3 series has led to an enormous, somewhat contentious thread on the linux-kernel mailing list. The proximate cause was some changes that made the ext4 filesystem do less I/O early in the boot phase, incidentally causing fewer interrupts, but the underlying issue was the getrandom() system call, which was blocking until the /dev/urandom pool was initialized—as designed. Since the system in question was not gathering enough entropy due to the lack of unpredictable interrupt timings, that would hang more or less forever. That has called into question the design and implementation of getrandom().

Security updates for Friday

Friday 27th of September 2019 01:25:01 PM
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dcmtk), openSUSE (rust), Red Hat (redhat-virtualization-host), and SUSE (ghostscript, nghttp2, and u-boot).

[$] Upstreaming multipath TCP

Thursday 26th of September 2019 03:38:27 PM
The multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol (and the Linux implementation of it) have been under development for a solid decade; MPTCP offers a number of advantages for devices that have more than one network interface available. Despite having been deployed widely, though, MPTCP is still not supported by the upstream Linux kernel. At the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference, Matthieu Baerts and Mat Martineau discussed the current state of the Linux MPTCP implementation and what will be required to get it into the mainline kernel.

Security updates for Thursday

Thursday 26th of September 2019 02:32:54 PM
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (dovecot), Debian (lemonldap-ng, openssl, and ruby-nokogiri), openSUSE (fish3, ibus, nmap, and openssl-1_1), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (mariadb, python-numpy, and SDL2), and Ubuntu (firefox).

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 26, 2019

Thursday 26th of September 2019 01:58:16 AM
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 26, 2019 is available.

[$] Monitoring the internal kernel ABI

Wednesday 25th of September 2019 04:23:52 PM
As part of the Distribution Kernels microconference at Linux Plumbers Conference 2019, Matthias Männich described how the Android project monitors changes to the internal kernel ABI. As Android kernels evolve, typically by adding features and bug fixes from more recent kernel versions, the project wants to ensure that the ABI remains the same so that out-of-tree modules will still function. While the talk was somewhat Android-specific, the techniques and tools used could be applied to other distributions with similar needs (e.g. enterprise distributions).

Security updates for Wednesday

Wednesday 25th of September 2019 03:12:23 PM
Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, libgcrypt20, and spip), Fedora (compat-openssl10, expat, ghostscript, ibus, java-1.8.0-openjdk-aarch32, and SDL2_image), openSUSE (bird, chromium, kernel, libreoffice, links, and varnish), Oracle (httpd:2.4 and qemu-kvm), Red Hat (kernel), Scientific Linux (qemu-kvm), SUSE (djvulibre, dovecot22, ghostscript, kernel, libxml2, and python-Twisted), and Ubuntu (file-roller and libreoffice).

A patent lawsuit against GNOME

Wednesday 25th of September 2019 02:47:08 PM
A company called Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC has filed a lawsuit [PDF] against the GNOME Foundation, alleging that the Shotwell photo manager violates patent 9,936,086. Stay tuned, more details will surely emerge.

Google Code‑in 2019

Tuesday 24th of September 2019 08:34:37 PM
Google Code-in (GCI) provides students ages 13 to 17 the opportunity to participate in open source projects. Google has announced the 2019 round of GCI. "New contributors bring fresh perspectives, ideas, and enthusiasm into their open source communities, helping them thrive. Throughout the last 9 years, 58 GCI organizations helped 11,000 students from 108 countries make real contributions to open source projects; and to this day many of those students continue to participate in various open source communities and many have become mentors themselves! Some have even gone on to join Google Summer of Code (GSoC)." Organizations that are interested in mentoring students can apply for GCI starting October 10. GCI begins December 2, 2019 and ends January 23, 2020.

Release for CentOS Linux 8 and CentOS Streams

Tuesday 24th of September 2019 05:40:53 PM
CentOS Linux 8.0-1905 has been released. The release notes have more details. The CentOS project also introduces CentOS Stream. "CentOS Stream is a rolling-release Linux distro that exists as a midstream between the upstream development in Fedora Linux and the downstream development for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is a cleared-path to contributing into future minor releases of RHEL while interacting with Red Hat and other open source developers. This pairs nicely with the existing contribution path in Fedora for future major releases of RHEL."

[$] Better guidance for database developers

Tuesday 24th of September 2019 05:05:24 PM
At the inaugural Databases microconference at the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), two developers who work on rather different database systems had similar complaints about developing for Linux. Richard Hipp, creator of the SQLite database, and Andres Freund from the PostgreSQL project both lamented the lack of definitive documentation on how to best use the kernel's I/O interfaces, especially for corner cases. Both of the sessions, along with others in the microconference, pointed to a strong need for more interaction between user-space and kernel developers.

Security updates for Tuesday

Tuesday 24th of September 2019 02:42:25 PM
Security updates have been issued by Debian (php5), Fedora (blis, kernel, and kernel-headers), openSUSE (bird, curl, fish3, ghostscript, ibus, kernel, libgcrypt, openldap2, openssl-1_1, skopeo, and util-linux and shadow), Oracle (dovecot and kernel), Red Hat (dovecot, httpd:2.4, qemu-kvm, and redhat-virtualization-host), Scientific Linux (dovecot), SUSE (djvulibre, expat, firefox, libopenmpt, and rust), and Ubuntu (ibus and Mosquitto).

[$] 5.4 Merge window, part 1

Monday 23rd of September 2019 03:52:43 PM
As of this writing, 9,632 non-merge changesets have been merged for the 5.4 kernel. This merge window is thus off to a strong start. There has been a wide range of changes merged across the kernel tree, including vast numbers of cleanups and fixes.

Security updates for Monday

Monday 23rd of September 2019 02:48:55 PM
Security updates have been issued by Debian (expat, php-pecl-http, and php7.0), Fedora (ImageMagick, jackson-annotations, jackson-bom, jackson-core, jackson-databind, and rubygem-rmagick), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, ibus, kernel, samba, and thunderbird), openSUSE (chromium), Oracle (dovecot and kernel), Red Hat (dbus, kernel, kernel-alt, and kpatch-patch), Scientific Linux (dovecot and kernel), and SUSE (expat, ibus, kernel, kernel-source-rt, nmap, openssl, and webkit2gtk3).

Stable kernels for the weekend

Saturday 21st of September 2019 09:03:21 PM
The 5.3.1, 5.2.17, 4.19.75, 4.14.146, 4.9.194, and 4.4.194 stable kernels are all available; each contains another set of important fixes.

LLVM 9.0.0 released

Saturday 21st of September 2019 07:44:48 PM
Version 9.0.0 of the LLVM compiler suite is out. Headline changes include asm goto support — fixing one of the main impediments to compiling the kernel on x86 with LLVM — and non-experimental support for the RISC-V architecture.

[$] Many uses for Core scheduling

Friday 20th of September 2019 07:23:06 PM
Some new kernel features are welcomed by the kernel development community, while others are a rather harder sell. It is fair to say that core scheduling, which makes CPU scheduling harder by placing constraints on which processes may run simultaneously in a core, is of the latter variety. Core scheduling was the topic of (at least) three different sessions at the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference. One of the most interesting outcomes, perhaps, is that there are use cases for this feature beyond protection from side-channel attacks.

Security updates for Friday

Friday 20th of September 2019 03:07:22 PM
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bird, opendmarc, php7.3, and qemu), Fedora (bird, dino, nbdkit, and openconnect), Oracle (nginx:1.14, patch, and thunderbird), Red Hat (dovecot, kernel, kernel-alt, and kernel-rt), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), and SUSE (kernel, openssl, openssl-1_1, python-SQLAlchemy, and python-Werkzeug).

More in Tux Machines

today's howtos

today's leftovers

  • openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019

    This year, openSUSE.Asia summit 2019 host in Indonesia again.

  • Why Taking Responsibility for Our Carbon Emissions Means Promoting the Right to Repair

    In our global system of production, consumption and premature disposal, using products for longer should be considered a pillar of global climate justice, and in an even broader sense, environmental justice.Saturday 19 October 2019 marks the third International Repair Day, and the theme this year is “Repair for Future”. | By Janet Gunter

  • The Most Important Right-to-Repair Hearing Yet Is on Monday

    The Massachusetts state legislature is holding a three-hour hearing on the Digital Right to Repair act, a bill that would require electronics manufacturers to sell repair parts and tools, make repair guides available, and would prevent them from using software to artificially prevent repair.

    So far this year, 19 other states have considered similar legislation. It hasn’t passed in any of them. But Massachusetts is one of the most likely states to pass the legislation, for a few different reasons. Most notably, the legislation is modeled on a law passed unanimously in Massachusetts in 2012 that won independent auto shops the right to repair, meaning lawmakers there are familiar with the legislation and the benefits that it has had for auto repair shops not just in Massachusetts but around the country.

  • [Older] GNS Technical Specification Milestone 1/4

    We are happy to announce the completion of the first milestone for the GNS Specification. The objective is to provide a detailed and comprehensive guide for implementors of the GNU Name System. The initial milestone consists of documenting the cryptographic principles of GNS data structures. This includes the specification of the GNS record wire and serialization formats as well as internationalization.

  • GNUnet project invited to ICANN66

    We are delighted to announce that ICANN has invited the GNUnet project to speak at the next ICANN Annual General Meeting. We have been invited to join a panel discussion on Emerging Internet Identifier Technologies in order to share our ideas and work on the GNU Name System (GNS). ICANN generously offered to cover travel and accomodation. The meeting will take place in Montreal between 2 - 7 November. The panel will tentatively be help on November 6th.

  • AWS Dangles Free Credits to Lure Open Source Developers

    Amazon Web Services is taking steps to improve its relations with open source software developers, offering them free service credits and sponsoring a popular programming language.

  • Opmantek Expands IT Audit Capabilities With Open-AudIT Cloud
  • Help! They’re about to obliterate us!

    Don’t let Yahoo fool you, with what they say, “Oh, just click here and download your content.” It’s not that simple. They have been breaking things to prevent us from leaving for years, and they are not making it easy now either. We live in a broken interface, and rescuing our content, especially quickly, is not at all easy.

  • USB-C Has Finally Come Into Its Own

    Even so, the road has been bumpy. Just because USB-C can do all these things doesn’t mean that it always does. Take charging. While the body that governs USB protocol, the USB Implementers Forum, sets a Power Delivery standard, manufacturers have come up with their own unique implementations as well. Qualcomm has Quick Charge, Samsung has Adaptive Fast Charging, and so on. The result, as nicely detailed by Android Authority earlier this year, is a landscape where you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get, especially once you reach for a third-party cable. Your phone will still charge, just not as fast as advertised if all of the involved components aren’t built for the same spec. And in extreme cases, some dodgy cables have been capable of frying devices altogether by drawing too much power for a specific task.

Security Leftovers

  • 6 top OSINT tools: Find sensitive public info before hackers do

    The same OSINT tactics used for spycraft can now be applied to cybersecurity. Most organizations have vast, public-facing infrastructures that span many networks, technologies, hosting services and namespaces. Information can be stored on employee desktops, in legacy on-prem servers, with employee-owned BYOD devices, in the cloud, embedded inside devices like webcams, or even hidden in the source code of active apps and programs.

  • 3 steps toward improving container security

    As developers increasingly make use of containers, securing them becomes more and more important. Gartner has named container security one of its top 10 concerns for this year in this report, which isn’t surprising given their popularity in producing lightweight and reusable code and lowering app dev costs. In this article, I’ll look at the three basic steps involved in container security: securing the build environment, securing the underlying container hosts, and securing the actual content that runs inside each container. To be successful at mastering container security means paying attention to all three of these elements. If you step back a moment, container security isn’t all that different from ordinary application security. If you replace the appropriate words in the above paragraph, you could have written this post 10, 20, or even 30 years ago with a few other modifications. But containers do have a few oddities and new twists that are worth highlighting. To get started, I suggest you listen to the recorded talk by Red Hat’s Dan Walsh about general container security considerations.

  • Good guy, Microsoft: Multi-factor auth outage gives cloudy Office, Azure users a surprise three-day weekend

    Microsoft is battling to fix its knackered multi-factor authentication system that today blocked customers from logging into their Microsoft 365 and Azure services. The Redmond giant confirmed on Friday an unspecified glitch prevented customers in North America from receiving the multi-factor auth (MFA) codes they need to sign into their cloud-based accounts. Obviously, those not using MFA are not affected. Though Azure and Microsoft 365 MFA users initially were locked out, by mid-day US Pacific Time, Azure was said to be working again, leaving 365 subscribers trying to log in high and dry. "We've taken multiple actions to mitigate impact and are working to validate service restoration," Microsoft told Microsoft 365 aka Office 365 customers. "In parallel, we're continuing to review system logs and service telemetry to better understand the underlying root cause."

  • Update Warning Issued For Millions Of Microsoft Windows 10 Users

    At this stage, it isn’t clear what is the cause with users citing BSOD failures with cldflt.sys, Affinity applications and more but all have found that uninstalling KB4517389 fixes the problem, which pins the source squarely on this already troubled update. Needless to say, the problem with a BSOD bug is you may not be lucky enough to get back to your desktop to do this. If you are, then navigate to Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features > Installed updates > KB4517389 > Uninstall KB4517389 has already rolled out to millions of users but for hundreds of millions who have not received it yet, use Microsoft’s Show or Hide updates tool to block it from installing on your PC.

LibreOffice: Continuous Endnotes in Writer and AutoCorrect Dialog

  • Continuous endnotes in Writer

    What you can see is that endnotes unconditionally start after the end of the document content in Word, while endnotes are unconditionally on separate endnote pages in Writer. The new ContinuousEndnotes layout compatibility flag in Writer allows rendering endnotes the Word way. This new flag is enabled by default for DOC files, disabled otherwise. All this is available in LibreOffice master (towards 6.4), so you can try it out right now, if interested.

  • [LibreOffice] AutoCorrect Dialog

    In addition to an better placement the Word Completion Tab should be now easier to understood.

More on Tux Machines: About ● Gallery ● Forum ● Blogs ● Search ● News ● RSS Feed

Part of Bytes Media ● Sister sites below.

TechBytes Techrights button

Powered by Drupal, an open source content management system

Content available under CC-BY-SA CC

© by original authors

Powered by CentOS 6.5 (GNU/Linux), Varnish, and Drupal 6