LWDW 142: Big Red

Big Blue buys Redhat, Xfce 4.14 nears completion, an open source FIDO2 security key lands on Kickstarter and Pine64 is working on a Linux Smartphone.

Special thanks to:
FrostClaw
Vertinog
DirtyDean
LinuxGNUru

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Colour key – Venn Pedro Jill

Big Red

Largest software purchase in history.
Expect to see tn (for telnet), help (for man) and all other sorts of atrocities grafted from AIX into RedHat Linux.
Anything thing that helps kill off z/OS.
Heh.
As we have talked about before, there has been speculation of an acquisition with Red Hat for a while now, including by the likes of Novell and Microsoft.
Actually, makes sense though, because IBM has been using Red Hat’s cloud services for quite some time.
Red Hat has the software and IBM has the hardware. AIX Unix is not a thing anymore.
IBM is playing catch up with Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Medium sized Blue

15 years since the release of Fedora Core 1.
GNOME 3.30 for the desktop.
Enable ZRAM for swap on ARMv7 and aarch64 pre generated images to improve performance and reliability on ARM Single Board Computers such a the Raspberry Pi.
ZRAM works by compressing part of memory and using it as a swap space.
A new Fedora Scientific spin which includes open source scientific and numerical tools.

Assuring Orange

As we have mentioned in the past, Ubuntu is the most popular linux distribution for cloud, server and enterprise infrastructure.
Mark Shuttleworth talks about this in his statement, and that many Red Hat customers had switched to Ubuntu.
After reading this article several times and reading between the lines, I felt that Shuttleworth was saying that Ubuntu will remain committed to business as usual, and no company will be acquiring its assets.
Many people in the community are speculating a Microsoft takeover of Ubuntu, and I think this is Shuttleworth’s answer to that.
It didn’t turn into a plug for Ubuntu until the fourth paragraph, progress.
RHEL and Ubuntu are not in competition, different bases.
Buntu has seen wide adoption in cloud / vps while RH deals with enterprise.

Full Solus Ahead

Since they are discussing it, we might as well touch on it.
I am so sorry Joshua Strobl wants us to stop supporting Solus on Patreon because they can’t access the account due to Ikey’s absence.
Just cancelled my Patreon donation to Solus and here is what I wrote Patreon and Tweeted for the reason why:
- The creator Ikey Doherty is ill and not communicating, and the Solus Core Team can not access this account to get funded.
- Please fix this Patreon so they can receive the money from this account that they deserve!!!!
For those of you not wanting to decipher a wall of text in chat log format.
- Ikey is cool, but MIA.
- Solus was not raptor bus proof.
- Something went wrong, they has issues getting control of services.
- Most things are sorted and in better shape than they were originally.
- Solus has applied to join the Software Freedom Conservancy.
- Development has resumed.
Bit of a heads up in case anyone finds themselves in a similar situation.
Google account, gone, export what you can and create a new one.
As for PayPal, Patreon or any service that holds financial / personal data (tax id, addresses, bank info) let it go.
For a GANG of reasons they cannot hand over control of those accounts nor should you want them to.
Protip: Deadman switch email system that poops out any and all logins if someone goes MIA for X amount of days.
Member how I told everyone to ignore the first email if I disappear after jury duty?
If you don’t have something like that set up, get it done right meow.

Distro search

A Torrent repository you can search via command line or webserver, sweet!
And it works great!
It’s neat but the initial list is from TPB.
People, don’t download your ISO’s from TPB.

Not GIMP online

Photopea is a free online tool for editing raster art and vector graphics with support for PSD, XCF and Sketch files.
Photopea has been one of my favorite free online photo editors for several years, and is one of the most advanced and Photoshop like in this space.
It has many of the features of a professional photo editor you would expect:
- Selection tools
- Layers and layer masks
- Blend modes, color adjustment tools and image filters.
- A great selection of fonts with previews
Many of the other more sophisticated online photo editors either have free trials but charge for later use or have a free version that is lighter and a pro version you have to pay for, like Pixlr Editor.
Little critter opens *.xcf files, didn’t expect that.
You can do some basic image editing and throw in a few filters.

Open security

Solo, the world’s first open source security key that supports the newest FIDO2 standard for secure 2 factor authentication login!
I do love my YubiKeys but the Solo Keys are much cheaper and completely open source, including the hardware and software.
- One Solo Key will retail $17.50 and one YubiKey is $45.00.
Yubico of YubiKey fame helped draft the open U2F or Universal 2nd Factor, and FIDO2 standards used by the Solo Keys.
I don’t normally back hardware Kickstarters but these are priced to sell.
Then again, if they have showed up at my house they probably remembered to bring a crowbar.

System D for Dolose

Several outlets tried to make this a booga booga story.
On all other Nix OSes, with the exception of OpenBSD, it looks like you have to have an active console session to initiate an attack.

IPVD

For the 11 people using IPV6, myself included.
A security bug in Systemd can be exploited over the network via systemd-networkd, causing your linux computer to be pwned and malicious code injected.
Lennart Poettering has already published a security fix for the vulnerable component, and it will be rolling out to distros, so update your OS ASAP.

XFCE4.soon

Xfce 4.14 is ~80% done.
They should have the other 80% sorted i short order.
All components of -core will be ported to Gtk+ 3.
- This will be completed 7 hours before the release of GTK 4.

Slice of Pi

TrickyPi

A display driver that lets you play games at 60fps from a Raspberry Pi!
Incredible, using a technology that is used for video codec compression is being used for a display driver.

PiPhone

The first PinePhone developer kit will be given to selected developers for free on November 1.
This is a combo kit of PINE A64 baseboard + SOPine module + 7″ Touch Screen Display + Camera + Wifi/BT + Playbox enclosure + Lithium-Ion battery case + LTE cat 4 USB dongle.
The target price is in the 100+ range so, $500?

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