“The Bazel team jumped in to help Olek and the COVID-19 research community. Yun Peng, Software Engineer at Google with Olek Wojnar led the team of Bazel and Debian volunteers to move the project forward. The joint effort between Debian and Google has produced some great results, including packaging the Bazel bootstrap variant in 6 months’ time (Debian 11 — released in Late 2021; Ubuntu 21.04 — 22 April 2021),” clarifies Google.

The search giant further says, “Bazel is now available as an easy to install package distributed on Debian and Ubuntu. The extended Google team continues to work with Debian towards the next step of packaging and distributing Tensorflow on Debian and other Linux distributions.”

While Olek Wojnar deserves a lot of credit for this successful partnership, Google has clearly acquired significant praise as well. Not only has the search giant assisted amazingly in this case, yet it has for some time been a companion of both the open-source and Linux communities.

• How To Install Brave Browser on Debian 10 - idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Brave Browser on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Brave is adapted from the Chromium project and runs smoothly on Linux Distributions. Brave browser is a free and open-source browser. it’s Fast, speed, security, and privacy by blocking trackers and still based on chromium so you have all the extension and features you might be looking for.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Brave browser on a Debian 10 (Buster).

• Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in March 2021

  Things never turn out the way you expect, so this month I was only able to accept 38 packages and rejected none. Due to the freeze, the overall number of packages that got accepted was 88.

 

• Time to get testing Ubuntu 21.04 ahead of release, plus Canonical loses another face

  We seem to have missed the actual Ubuntu Testing Week but a late reminder is better than none at all right? With Ubuntu 21.04 coming soon it's time to report the bugs.

  Now is a good time to get testing, as the Beta version is out now and a Release Candidate is due around April 15 so this is your chance to make one of the top Linux desktop distributions as good as possible for the 21.04 release due on April 22. According to Steam stats and our own stats, Ubuntu is in the top three most used for gaming.

  [...]

  Additionally, announced today, is that Alan Pope is set to leave Canonical. Pope has been a huge force in the Ubuntu community over the years and recently as a Developer Advocate, along with their work on Snap packages and much more. Good luck for the future popey! This follows on from Canonical losing Martin Wimpress, their previous desktop lead back in February.

 

• How to make your first snap

  Snaps are a way to package your software so it is easy to install on Linux. If you’re a snap developer already or you’re a part of the Linux community, and you care about how software is deployed, and you’re well versed in how software is packaged, and are tuned into the discussions around packaging formats, then you know about snaps and this article isn’t for you. If you’re anyone who is not all of those things, welcome. Let me tell you how I packaged my first snap to make it easier for people to install on Linux. 

A couple of days ago I wrote on debian-vote@ that a junior analyst could study the tally sheets of our general resolutions and find the cracks in our community.

In the end, with a quite naïve approach and a time budget of a few hours, I did not manage anything of interest. The figure below shows one circle per voter and my position as a red dot. The circles are spaces according to the similarity of the vote profiles after I concatenated the results of all GRs until 2010.

• Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, March 2021

  In March I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 12.25 hours from earlier months. I worked 25.75 hours and will carry over the remainder.

  I eventually settled on an apparently working patch series to fix the futex security issue in Linux 4.9. This went through upstream stable review and was included in 4.9.260. I applied the same fixes to the Debian package, along with some other security and regression fixes. I uploaded it and issued DLA-2586-1.

• Chris Lamb: Free software activities in March 2021

  One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes.

  The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

• Challenging times for Freexian (2/4)

  Freexian’s “Debian LTS” service has so far been entirely successful, with a steady growth over the years. Thanks to this, and even if there are always new challenges, it is fair to say that the Debian LTS team has met its goal in the last few years.

  While this started from the desire to make LTS a reality, many sponsors are only looking for a way to give back to Debian through their company, and to make sure that Debian fits their needs.

  But if you look at the bigger picture outside of this small LTS area, you will easily find many issues that need to be addressed if we want Debian to meet the needs of corporate users. Those issues can have widely different types and complexity be. They can be as simple as missing the latest upstream version for an important package because the maintainer disappeared and nobody noticed before it was too late (i.e. the release was frozen); or a somewhat basic piece of software not yet packaged at all; or a release critical bug that was left unattended. On the other end of the spectrum, some corporate requirements will prove tougher to solve, for instance for large software suites that are complex to package, or could potentially have an impact elsewhere in Debian.

  [...]

  This major shift in our offering would also be an ideal opportunity to build a professional, free-software based infrastructure aimed at sustaining this business, making it easier to administer the various aspects of this work, and easily allowing many more sponsors to join (individuals included!).

  On a more pragmatic/operational note, this shift will bring a lot of challenges to the table, and those can hardly be handled with the current resources of Freexian: if we hope to properly implement this new strategy, we’ll need some additional help.