Android Leftovers

• Lenovo A6000, Launched in January 2015 with Android KitKat, Receives Unofficial Android 8.0 Oreo Port

• Twitter is testing a Twitter Lite Android app in the Philippines

• Android O feature spotlight: Default Wi-Fi hotspot SSIDs are now unique

• Android 8.0 Oreo Causing Alarm Clock Issues, Random Reboots for Some Users

• Android unlock patterns are a boon for shoulder surfing attackers

Packet radio lives on through open source software

Packet radio is an amateur radio technology from the early 1980s that sends data between computers. Linux has natively supported the packet radio protocol, more formally known as AX.25, since 1993. Despite its age, amateur radio operators continue to use and develop packet radio today. A Linux packet station can be used for mail, chat, and TCP/IP. It also has some unique capabilities, such as tracking the positions of nearby stations or sending short messages via the International Space Station (ISS).

Linux 4.14-rc2

I'm back to my usual Sunday release schedule, and rc2 is out there in all the normal places. This was a fairly usual rc2, with a very quiet beginning of the week, and then most changes came in on Friday afternoon and Saturday (with the last few ones showing up Sunday morning). Normally I tend to dislike how that pushes most of my work into the weekend, but this time I took advantage of it, spending the quiet part of last week diving instead. Anyway, the only unusual thing worth noting here is that the security subsystem pull request that came in during the merge window got rejected due to problems, and so rc2 ends up with most of that security pull having been merged in independent pieces instead. Also: Linux 4.14-rc2 Kernel Released

Manjaro Linux Phasing out i686 (32bit) Support

In a not very surprising move by the Manjaro Linux developers, a blog post was made by Philip, the Lead Developer of the popular distribution based off Arch Linux, On Sept. 23 that reveals that 32-bit support will be phased out. In his announcement, Philip says, “Due to the decreasing popularity of i686 among the developers and the community, we have decided to phase out the support of this architecture. The decision means that v17.0.3 ISO will be the last that allows to install 32 bit Manjaro Linux. September and October will be our deprecation period, during which i686 will be still receiving upgraded packages. Starting from November 2017, packaging will no longer require that from maintainers, effectively making i686 unsupported.”