No, new linux or other OS but war is knocking on our doors daily now and we are in no position to say what will this mean for our daily material and social lives, how communication and exchange of information will continue. All we can tell from history is that “any” little freedoms we may locally enjoy can go out of the window as soon as the sound of the first bomb flies in.
– This does relate to linux and OS in general and users. –
Linux 6.2-rc2 kernel is out as the last commit in kernel.org at the start of the 2023 year. RUST is here, the initial code-base is included in the kernel. At least Arch seems to be disabling it for now, at the beta level at least, we shall see.
Rust is not just a language, as people commonly think, it is much more. It is a building environment, system, and a mode change of the philosophy of building packages from source. Rust incorporates its own git system in pulling code in from 2nd and 3rd parties. So if you have never gotten into the real FOSS practice of auditing code before you build, try and audit this stuff. If building in C you thought was a practice similar to building sand castles, by comparison, this is like building sand castles with quick-sand ON QUICK SAND.
… and so are all the projects we support and exhibit.
WordPress continues to make our life miserable, with all their new guis a web-client-google-apis. As if they are no longer capable of developing their own code for a web-client interface they must add google functionality, which in turn is not supported by all safety and privacy minded browsers, only those produced by google and mozilla corporations, making it hard to protect yourselves against the corporate bandits and have adequate functionality to publish.
Bits and pieces, some underlined and emphasized, from an article by Lucian Armasu:
by Lucian Armasu – Source: Kernel.org
The NSA-designed Speck encryption algorithm will be removed from version 4.20 of the Linux kernel, after just recently being added to the Linux kernel version 4.17 in June. The move comes after the International Standards Organization (ISO) rejected two of NSA’s cryptographic designs, Simon and Speck, on the basis of not being trustworthy….. Continue reading
Since we recently worked and reported on figOS 2.6, we took it up to ascii, installed OpenRC and openbox to it, Refracta published a beta version of its refracta9 (ascii based) 32bit iso. FigOS published a 2.8 version based on this new Refracta9. Note: both of those systems are 32bit but just a few hours ago the 64bit also appeared on SurgeForge as well. If you are number 2 downloading it you are the one after us 🙂
Distrowatch has only announced Refracta as a 32bit only system, which we think is a mistake. Here is the FigOS announcement as it came out on codeinfig.wordpress.com
a little over a week ago, this post mentioned plans for the next version of fig os:
https://codeinfig.wordpress.com/2018/04/09/the-next-versions-of-fig-os-probably/
since then, ive updated mkfigos 2.6 to 2.7 with the same refracta iso, and now that refracta 9 is in beta, ive taken the recent 2.7 and fig os 2.8 is now here: Continue reading
At last and not least, a distribution that is truly different than most others and most of all clones. Fig OS has a vision that is fresh and possibly the way to do things in the future. One may call it a hybrid, if hybrids didn’t already have a negative connotation. It is best to allow the creator to speak about it on his own than for us trying to describe his work. Promised not to be talking about Devuan any more we are breaking our rule partially, we are allowing someone else do the talking, and Refracta is not officially Devuan anyway. And why did Devuan refused to add this to their list of clones? Did they ban the persons arguing they should? Hmmm….. …! Maybe this makes Fig OS even more interesting.
Using fig, I originally set out to create a program that produced html tables of Puppy Linux distro analysis– in other words, there are countless derivatives and I wanted to examine and output the differences. Continue reading
Those two recent discoveries of a system vulnerability is due to hardware design and kernel development. One of the two has been partially addressed and fixed if you have updated your linux kernel to a patched one. The remaining seem pretty hard to be dealt with. In summary there is a way for memory handling to be leaked to the network revealing any sensitive information that may be temporarily retained as RAM or graphical memory. It is best not to read on rumors and interpretations but read the originals and monitor the status of fixing. At least temporarily you may change some habits and constantly wipe your memory to minimize the risk. Below find a set of links that official information originates and judge for yourself. Continue reading
by: Miyo-Linux
Tried to start a new topic, but my 51 year-old mind couldn’t figure it out! LOLOLOL! Anyway…what about Void Linux? I’ve been using it now (part-time) for awhile, and it’s pretty stinkin’ awesome. Seems as close to Arch as one could get without it being Arch, rolling release, seems more stable (?), and systemd-free. 🙂 They even have their “Voidified” version of Octopi called “Octoxpbs” for those who prefer a graphical package manager. I personally think Void is a force to be reckoned with. 🙂
Bitmask
For a while we thought Bitmask had vanished, but it is still alive and has a new edition, after the 0.92 and 0.94 beta. This is a an open-source free VPN and encrypted email that both users and vendors of such services can use.
https://bitmask.net/en/install
From the release notes:
0.10 “la rosa de foc”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++We are pleased to announce the Bitmask 0.10 release, codename “la rosa de foc”.
You can refer to `the changelog`_ for the whole changeset.
My test machine is an aging, stock (unmodified), mass produced enterprise grade, machine made by Dell.
Ever since my Manjaro days (Manjaro-OpenRC) when the first beta edition of Linux413 was released, it was the only kernel I have ever had problems with.* It always appeared to boot fine and only when X was about to start all input devices would freeze. Nothing in Xorg.0.log seemed to appear as an error. The machine would just lock up and only mechanically could it be rebooted. Continue reading
A new project for users who prefer Greek language that follows the progress of this blog now exists. It is named after Hellenic Linux as hellinux
It may be of little value and interest as the vast majority who speak Greek in the computing world are fluent in English as well, as a community to promote linux use and especially free of systemd it may be an important meeting place.
Since some Manjaro folk got all wired up about me making an unofficial page for people to communicate problems they had and more importantly, since there was no contact made by anyone in the ArtiX team to say they were in favor or disliked the idea, I have decided to broaden the scope of this blog. Continue reading
systemd-free linux community 