Mirrors for Speedier Downloads

To put it briefly, PureOS provides ISO images and packages for download. Recently, we’ve seen increased traffic on our download site, and we expect that traffic to grow. We’re hoping to address increased traffic with mirrors for both package updates and downloads. We’re very happy to announce that Sonic, a highly-ranked and privacy-respecting ISP, has offered to host a mirror for PureOS. This will alleviate some of the traffic, especially for those in North America, without compromising security. The security of the packages remains guaranteed by our signatures; the mirror simply holds another, identical set of packages, signed with Purism’s key. The mirror is easy to use. For example, if you’d like to use the mirrors for downloading an image, simply use this URL: https://mirrors.sonic.net/pureos/downloads/. And here’s the link to the most recent GNOME Live build.

Audiocasts/Shows

• LHS Episode #303: The Weekender XXXIV

  It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.

• 09/20/2019 | Linux Headlines

  The first Open Core Summit, an activist programmer takes aim at Chef, a French court disagrees with Valve’s licensing model, and Lennart Poettering wants to rethink the Home directory.

• Too Good To Be True | TechSNAP 412

  It's TechSNAP story time as we head out into the field with Jim and put Sure-Fi technology to the test. Plus an update on Wifi 6, an enlightening Chromebook bug, and some not-quite-quantum key distribution.

Graphics: AMD, GNOME Shell on Wayland and NVIDIA Nsight Graphics

• AMD Pushes Back 3rd Gen Threadripper & Ryzen 9 3950X Until November

  While the Ryzen 9 3950X and 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper processors were reportedly on track for launching in October with updates as of a few weeks ago, today AMD announced a slight delay in launching these new processors.

• AMD have delayed the Ryzen 9 3950X and 3rd generation Threadripper until November

  Today, AMD sent out a brief statement about a delay in their 16 core Ryzen 9 3950X and the 3rd generation Threadripper. [...] So if you were looking to grab either, keep an eye out in November. Will share any more news when they send it about the expected date and pricing.

• AMD Sends In Initial Batch Of Fixes To Linux 5.4 - Includes Dali Support

  While just yesterday the big DRM feature pull was sent in for Linux 5.4, AMD has also volleyed out their initial batch of fixes for this next version of the kernel. This new AMDGPU pull isn't strictly fixes but as anticipated does include the recently reported Dali APU support. Dali along with Renoir -- also newly-supported in Linux 5.4 -- are some of AMD's 2020 APUs. Dali will be targeting the lower-end of the spectrum it's expected for value mobile/embedded. From the driver code, Dali looks like a newer revved version of the current-gen Picasso APUs. Both Dali and Renoir are based on the Vega architecture.

• Linux Plumbers Conference 2019, part 2

  Pain points and missing pieces with Wayland, or specifically GNOME Shell: GNOME Shell is slower Synergy doesn't work(?) - needs to be in the compositor With Nvidia proprietary driver, mutter and native Wayland clients get GPU acceleration but X clients don't No equivalent to ssh -X. Pipewire goes some way to the solution. The whole desktop can be remoted over RDP which can be tunnelled over SSH. No remote login protocol like XDMCP No Xvfb equivalent Various X utilities that grab hot-keys don't have equivalents for Wayland Not sure if all X's video acceleration features are implemented. Colour format conversion and hardware scaling are implemented. Pointer movement becomes sluggish after a while (maybe related to GC in GNOME Shell?) Performance, in general. GNOME Shell currently has to work as both a Wayland server and an X compositor, which limits the ability to optimise for Wayland.

• NVIDIA's Nsight Graphics 2019.5 Released With Better Vulkan Coverage

  NVIDIA this week released Nsight Graphics 2019.5 as the newest feature update to their proprietary developer tool for graphics profiling and debugging across multiple APIs. The Nsight Graphics 2019.5 release brings support for more than a dozen new Vulkan extensions, a variety of user-interface improvements, compatibility enhancements, and better syntax highlighting.

Ubuntu: Video Encoder Performance, Ubuntu Touch, LZ4 Compression

• Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu 19.10 Video Encoder Performance On The Core i9 9900K

  Often when doing cross-distribution benchmarks, readers often comment on the performance of Clear Linux particularly for video encoding use-cases as surprisingly different from other distributions. Some argue that it's just over the default CPU frequency scaling governor or compiler flag defaults, so here is a look at that with Ubuntu 19.10 daily benchmarked against Clear Linux. On the same Core i9 9900K system I recently ran some benchmarks looking at Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu 19.10 and then Ubuntu 19.10 with various common tunables to make it more akin to Clear Linux. Ubuntu 19.10 was used due to its recent software components being at similar versions to Intel's rolling-release distribution.

• Serge Hallyn: First experience with Ubuntu Touch

  For the past few weeks I’ve been using a nexus 4 running ubuntu touch as, mostly, my daily driver. I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit. In part that’s just the awesome size of the nexus 4. In part, it’s the ubuntu touch interface itself. If you haven’t tried it, you really should. (Sailfish ambiances are so much prettier, but ubuntu touch is much nicer to use – the quick switch to switch between two apps, for instance. Would that I could have both.). And in part it’s just the fact that it really feels like – is – a regular ubuntu system.

• Ubuntu 19.10 to use LZ4 compression to boot even faster

  anonical’s Ubuntu 19.10 “Eoan Ermine” will boot even faster than its predecessor, Ubuntu 19.04 “Disco Dingo” according to Ubuntu’s kernel team. After extensive testing on a variety of compression options on the Ubuntu installation image, Canonical engineers determined that the LZ4 decompression method provided a most appreciable gain in speed.