Linux

Linux stuff

  • Amazon Workspaces offers Ubuntu virtual desktops

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    The AWS blog writes that the company loves to give its customers choices: the choice of infrastructure to deploy their workloads, store their most important data, or the operating systems for their virtual desktops.

    To this end it has started offering Ubuntu virtual desktops, based partly on the premise that “Ubuntu is the most widely used operating system among professional developers (66 percent Ubuntu, 61 percent Windows, and 57 percent macOS)”.

    AWS Ubuntu virtual desktop

    To date your correspondent has seen both Ubuntu’s Unity desktop – as shown above – and the lightweight Xfce desktop as an alternative.

    It has been a quip of open source enthusiasts that next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop (instead of the Beast of Redmond’s ubiquitous operating system.

    AWS is now demonstrating that 2022 is the year of the Linux desktop on someone else’s computer. 😀

  • Audacity 3.2 released

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    When it comes to open source audio editing software, Audacity is the software package your ‘umble scribe has been using and recommending to others for over a decade and a half.

    The latest minor point release for the software – to version 3.2 – nevertheless brings some major new features, including real-time effects. Furthermore, the package will now run natively on Apple’s Silicon Macs, according to German IT news website heise, whose headline rates it as ‘Genuine competition for commercial audio software‘.

    Audacity was first released in 22 years ago and since then it has made major strides towards becoming a fully-fledged end-to-end production tool for everyone who works with audio, from multi-track recording and editing to podcast production, i.e. a complete digital audio workstation (DAW).

    The new version press release states that the Audacity team has been working hard to empower audio creators with the following highlights of this release: real time editing capabilities, VST3 plugin support and sharing, the latter via Audacity’s new audio.com sister service.

    For a full list of changes in Audacity 3.2, read the release notes.

    Audacity is available for download for Linux, Mac and Windows and your correspondent is awaiting the new version’s arrival in the Debian GNU/Linux software repositories.

  • LibreOffice 7.4 released

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The release was announced today of LibreOffice 7.4 Community, the latest version of the free and open source office suite. It is available immediately for download for Linux, MacOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors) and Windows.

    LibreOffice 7.4 banner

    The new release comes packed with many new features and improvements.

    GENERAL
    • Support for WebP images and EMZ/WMZ files
    • Help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library
    • Search field for the Extension Manager
    • Performance and compatibility improvements
    Writer (Word processor)
    • Better change tracking in the footnote area
    • Edited lists show original numbers in change tracking
    • New typographic settings for hyphenation
    Calc (spreadsheets)
    • Support for 16,384 columns in spreadsheets
    • Extra functions in drop-down AutoSum widget
    • New menu item to search for sheet names
    Impress (Presentations)
    • New support for document themes

    The new features are summarised in the following video.

    LibreOffice 7.4 provides a large number of improvements and new features targeted at users sharing documents with MS Office or migrating from MS Office: such users should check regularly for new LibreOffice releases since the development progress is so fast, that each new version offers dramatic improvements compared with its predecessor.

    LibreOffice provides the highest level of compatibility within the office suite market segment, with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats for security and robustness – to superior support for MS Office files, to filters for a large number of legacy document formats, thus returning ownership and control to users.

    LibreOffice for Business

    For business deployments, TDF strongly recommends approaching the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from its partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs; see the dedicated business page for details.

  • Happy 25th birthday, GNOME

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Tech

    GNOME's 25th anniversary banner

    Yesterday the GNOME Foundation announced the happy news that the project had reached the venerable age of 25 years old, with special thanks to its founders, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero, plus its contributors and supporters over the last quarter of a century.

    As is fairly common within the technology world, the GNOME name is an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment.

    In its lifetime,GNOME has the default desktop environment of many major Linux distributions, including Debian, Endless OS, Fedora Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Ubuntu and Tails; it is also fulfils the same role for Solaris, a Unix operating system.

    GNOME42 desktop environment

    What began as a two-person project has certainly grown and flourished over the years, attracting support from not only volunteers but major players in the free and open source world such as Red Hat. Furthermore, there’s a new, special commemorative website to visit too: https://happybirthdaygnome.org/.

    Many happy returns!

  • Fedora Project wants to ban CC0 licence for software

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The CC0 Creative Commons licence exempts work form copyright claims, but does not exclude patent claims; and this presents a problem for free and open source software, as German IT news site heise reports.

    Fedora logoThe Fedora Project would like to remove the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence from the list of permitted software licences, as Richard Fontata from the Fedora Legal Documentation Team wrote in a post to the Fedora mailing list. The reason for the change is that the Fedora Project has agreed that software under a licence which does not exclude patent claims cannot be regarded as free and open source software (FOSS).

    Public Domain logoThe Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0) licence is the most liberal Creative Commons licence. It places works in the public domain, with the copyright holder waiving all copyright and related rights worldwide insofar as this is legally possible. However, the patent or trade mark rights of any party are specifically not affected by CC0, so it is thus possible to place works subject to patent rights under CC0.

    Patents against open source

    In the 2000s various companies, including Microsoft, have attempted to asset patent claims against Linux and open source software. The Open Invention Network (OIN), whose members mutually waive all patent claims against one another, came into existence as a response to these moves.

    Furthermore, in the open source world, there is the risk that companies could release code which is protected by that company’s own patents. If other developers use this code, they are unwittingly exposed to the risk of patent lawsuits. There is therefore widespread agreement in the FOSS world that open source licences must explicitly exclude the possibility of patent claims by the author*.

    In its permitted licences list the Fedora Project distinguishes between licences for software, content, documentation and fonts. CC0, which was previously listed as a permitted licence for software and content, will in future only be allowed for content. According to Fontana, it still has to be clarified whether any program packages will be affected by this change.

    *= for intellectual property purposes software is regarded as a work of literature.

  • Google and Microsoft finance open source security campaign

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Security, Tech

    A new initiative by the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) should improve the security of open source applications, German news site heise reports. The campaign, called the Alpha-Omega Project, is the result of negotiations at the White House between representatives of technology companies, US authorities and non-profit organisations. The initial funding of $5 mn. is being financed jointly by Google and Microsoft.

    Image courtesy of opensource.com

    OpenSSF is organising the project in two parts – Alpha and Omega. In the Alpha section expert groups are analysing the security situation of the most-used open source applications to find and remedy vulnerabilities. This should train software operators and users in security awareness. In the Omega section a team of software developers is working on automated tests for over 10,000 distributed open source project to propose possible security measures to their user communities.

    Open source projects and libraries are widely used in software development. The Log4Shell vulnerability in the widely-distributed Log4j Java library recently showed how critical an attack can be. Even after a month and a half it still remains unclear whether companies have survived the worst. Users and companies should therefore investigate their own systems for vulnerable instances of the Log4j library and install current patches.

    More details of the Alpha-Omega Project can be found in the official announcement.

  • Ubuntu 21.10 released

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Two days ago, Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu Linux 21.10, codenamed Impish Indri.

    Ubuntu 21.10 wallpaper

    Canonical’s CEO Mark Shuttleworth said of the release:

    As open source becomes the new default, we aim to bring Ubuntu to all the corners of the enterprise and all the places developers want to innovate. From the biggest public clouds to the tiniest devices, from DGX servers to Windows WSL workstations, open source is the springboard for new ideas and Ubuntu makes that springboard safe, secure and consistent.

    This latest Ubuntu release is a short-term one with nine months of support that precedes the next long-term support (LTS) version, Ubuntu 22.04.

    The new release’s default desktop interface is GNOME 40, whilst there have also been some updates to the distribution’s default desktop programs, which now include the LibreOffice 7.2 office productivity suite, the Thunderbird 91 e-mail client, and the Firefox 92 web browser.

    Ubuntu 21.10 is available for immediate download for 64-bit systems (32-bit support ceased some time ago. Ed.)

  • Introducing Ubuntu Frame

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Earlier this month, Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced the release of Ubuntu Frame

    With Ubuntu Frame, developers no longer need to integrate and maintain partial solutions such as DRM, KMS, input protocols or security policies to power and secure their displays. This means less code to manage, fewer opportunities for bugs and vulnerabilities in untried code and more time for developing the display’s content.

    Ubuntu Frame screenshot
    Ubuntu Frame screenshot

    When developing Ubuntu Frame, the goal was to minimise the development and deployment time for building graphic solutions for edge devices by leveraging existing applications and hardening security techniques. Ubuntu Frame is therefore compatible with toolkits such as Flutter, Qt, GTK, Electron and SDL2. Furthermore, it also has a solution for applications based on HTML5 and Java, inter alia. It is also worth mentioning that Ubuntu Frame’s users benefit from easy configuration and deployment options thanks to snaps, which is being heralded asthe next-generation package format for Linux.

    Ubuntu Frame provides developers with all they need to deploy fully interactive applications: it comes with all the interfaces applications need to communicate securely with the host machine without developers needing to deal with the specific hardware. It also automatically enables all the functionality that end-users expect while interacting with digital displays, such as input from touchscreens, keyboard and mouse. Developers also don’t need to worry about window behaviours and dynamics since they are all configured.

    Commenting on the launch, Michał Sawicz, Smart Displays Engineering Manager at Canonical said the following:

    Ubuntu Frame’s reliability has been widely tested in the field. Its technology has been in development for over 7 years and in production for 5 years, using state-of-the-art techniques, and deployed in production to Linux desktop and mobile users. As such, Ubuntu Frame is one of the most mature graphical servers available today for embedded devices.

  • Debian 11 bullseye released

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoYour ‘umble scribe has been using Debian GNU/Linux for the best part of 15 years now.

    Besides being a distribution in its own right, Debian is also used as the basis for many other Linux distros, such as the Ubuntu family and derivatives, as well as specialised distros like the security- and privacy-conscious Tails.

    Furthermore, Debian stable version releases don't occur very often, only every 2-3 years (unlike the Ubuntu family, which is on a rigid twice-yearly release cycle. Ed.).

    Consequently, a Debian stable version release is a major event and the latest release occurred on Friday, as announced in an email to the Debian Developer Announce mailing list

    The start of the email reads as follows:

    Hi,
    On 14th August 2021 we released Debian 11 “bullseye”.
    There are too many people who should be thanked for their work on getting us to this point to list them all individually, and we would be sure to miss some. Nevertheless, we would like to particularly thank the installer team, the buildd and ftp teams, the CD team, the publicity team, the webmasters, the Release Notes editors, porters and all the bug squashers, NMUers, package maintainers and translators who have contributed to making bullseye a great release of which we should all be proud.

    The email goes on the state that first point release for bullseye will take place about one month after the initial release.

    Testing will soon start for the next Debian stable release – Debian 12, codenamed bookworm.

    Finally, it’s worth noting that bullseye comes with 5 years’ support and an additional 10,000 software packages, as noted by ZDNet.

  • Debian 11 ‘bullseye’ due for release on 14th August

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoVersion 11 of Debian GNU/Linux, codenamed ‘bullseye‘, is due for release on 14th August The Register reports.

    A new Debian release is an important event in the world of Linux and free and open source software as it doesn’t happen all that frequently, the last version release being over 2 years ago.

    Not only is Debian an important distribution in its own right, but is also influential since it froms the basis for many others including the various flavours of Ubuntu (e.g. Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc. Ed.), Mint, Devuan, Knoppix, Tails, Raspbian, Pop!_OS and SteamOS, to name but a few.

    A post to Debian’s developer announcements list stated: “We plan to release on 2021-08-14”.

    It’s a little over 2 years since the last stable Debian version, Debian 10 or ‘buster‘, was made available for download.

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