Hi all!
This is my first post on Habré, I hope the community will be interested. In the Perm Linux Users Group, we saw a lack of review materials on free and open source news and decided that it would be nice to collect all the most interesting things every week, so that after reading such a review, a person would be sure that he did not miss anything important. I prepared issue number 0, published in our VKontakte group , and the next No. 1 and subsequent ones I think to try to publish on Habré. A few words about the format - I tried not to fill the review with only news about new releases of everything and everything, but to focus on news about implementations, organizational news, reports on the use of FOSS, open source and other licensing issues, the release of interesting materials, however, leaving the news about releases of the most important projects. Who cares about news about all releases - read . I would be grateful for comments and suggestions on the format and content. If I didn’t notice something and didn’t include it in the review, I would also be grateful for the links.
So, in issue No. 1 for January 27 - February 2, 2020 we read about:
- release of the Linux 5.5 kernel;
- release of the first part of Canonical's Windows 7 to Ubuntu migration guide;
- release of distribution for security research Kali Linux 2020.1;
- transition of CERN to open communication platforms;
- changes in Qt licensing conditions (spoiler - not very good changes);
- joining the Xen XCP-ng project, a free version of the virtualization platform for deploying and managing the XenServer cloud infrastructure;
- preparing for the release of Linux Mint Debian 4;
- new initiatives of the Ministry of Communications and FOSS as a response.
Linux 5.5 kernel release
About two months after the release of LTS version 5.4, the Linux 5.5 kernel is released.
The most notable changes, according to OpenNet:
- The ability to assign alternative names to network interfaces, now one interface can have several of them, in addition, the name size has been increased from 16 to 128 characters.
- Integration into the regular Crypto API of cryptographic functions from the Zinc library from the WireGuard project, which has been actively developed since 2015, has been audited by the encryption methods used and has proven itself in a number of large implementations that process large amounts of traffic.
- Ability to mirror to three or four drives in Btrfs RAID1, which allows you to save data when two or three devices are lost at the same time (previously mirroring was limited to two devices).
- A live patch state tracking mechanism that makes it easy to apply multiple live patches in combination to a running system by keeping track of previously applied patches and checking for compatibility with them.
- Addition of the Linux kernel unit testing framework kunit, manual and reference included.
- Improving the performance of the mac80211 wireless stack.
- Ability to access the root partition through the SMB protocol.
- Type verification in BPF ().
The new version received 15,505 edits from 1982 developers, affecting 11,781 files. About 44% of all changes presented in the new version are related to drivers, approximately 18% are related to updating code specific to hardware architectures, 12% are related to the network stack, 4% are related to file systems and 3% are related to internal kernel subsystems.
The Linux 5.5 kernel in particular is planned to be included in the April LTS release of Ubuntu 20.04.
Canonical has published the first part of the guide to moving from Windows 7 to Ubuntu
In the previous part of the review () we wrote about the activation of the FOSS community in connection with the end of support for Windows 7. Having first published a list of reasons for switching from Windows 7 to Ubuntu, Canonical continues this topic and opens a series of articles with a transition guide. In the first part, users are introduced to the terminology of operating systems and applications available to users in Ubuntu, they show how to prepare for the transition to a new OS and how to back up data. In the next part of the manual, Canonical promises to describe in detail the process of installing Ubuntu.
Release of distribution for security research Kali Linux 2020.1
The Kali Linux 2020.1 distribution kit has been released, designed to check systems for vulnerabilities, conduct audits, analyze residual information and identify the consequences of intruder attacks. All original developments created within the distribution are distributed under the GPL license and are available through a public Git repository. Several variants of iso images have been prepared for download, 285 MB in size (minimum image for installation over the network), 2 GB (Live build) and 2.7 GB (full installation).
Builds are available for x86, x86_64, ARM architectures (armhf and armel, Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi, ARM Chromebook, Odroid). The default desktop is Xfce, and KDE, GNOME, MATE, LXDE, and Enlightenment e17 are also supported.
In the new release:
- By default, work is provided under an unprivileged user (previously all operations were performed under root). Instead of root, the kali account is now offered.
- Instead of preparing different assemblies with their own desktops, a single universal installation image is offered with the ability to select a desktop to your taste.
- A new theme has been proposed for GNOME, available in dark and light versions;
- Added new icons for the applications included in the distribution;
- The “Kali Undercover” mode, which simulates the appearance of Windows, has been optimized so as not to arouse suspicion when working with Kali in public places;
- The distribution includes new utilities cloud-enum (OSINT tool with support for major cloud providers), emailharvester (collecting email addresses from a domain using popular search engines), phpggc (testing popular PHP frameworks), sherlock (search for a user by name in social networks) and splinter (web application testing);
- Removed utilities that require Python 2 to run.
CERN moves from Facebook Workplace to open platforms Mattermost and Discourse
The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the termination of the use of a corporate product for internal communication of Facebook Workplace employees. Instead of this platform, CERN will use open source solutions, Mattermost for quick messaging and chats, and Discourse for long discussions.
The abandonment of Facebook Workplace is driven by privacy concerns, a lack of control over your data, and a desire not to depend on the policies of a third-party company. In addition, the tariffs for the platform have been changed.
On January 31, 2020, the migration to open source was completed.
Qt Framework Licensing Terms Changes
The news concerns mainly developers and companies using Qt-based products.
The Qt Company, which maintains and provides consulting services for the popular cross-platform C ++ framework Qt, announced a change in the terms of access to its products.
There are three main changes:
- You will need a Qt account to install the Qt binaries.
- Long Term Support (LTS) releases and the offline installer will only be available to commercial licensees.
- There will be a new Qt offering for small businesses.
The first point delivers only some inconvenience, you will have to register on the company's website. However, given the ever-increasing trend towards the collection of personal data by everyone who can and the frequent scandals with leaks, this is unlikely to please anyone.
The second point is much more annoying - now the communities of projects that depend on Qt will have to put more effort into maintaining the code. For example, LTS versions of distributions will either need to maintain LTS branches of Qt on their own in order to make security updates and other important ones there, or update to the latest versions, which can lead to problems with programs on this framework, all of which are unlikely to be able to quickly port their code.
Third, they return the Startup and Small Business license for $499 per year, which includes all the features of the regular license, except for distribution licenses and excluding full support (only installation support is provided). Such a license will be available to companies with less than $100 in annual revenue or funding and fewer than five employees.
XCP-ng, a free variant of Citrix XenServer, is part of the Xen project
The developers of XCP-ng, a free and open replacement for the proprietary cloud infrastructure management platform XenServer (Citrix Hypervisor), have announced that they have joined the Xen Project, which is being developed by the Linux Foundation. The transition to the Xen Project will allow us to consider XCP-ng as a standard distribution for deploying a virtual machine infrastructure based on the Xen cross-platform hypervisor distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL v2 and XAPI. XCP-ng, like Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer), has a simple and intuitive interface for installation and administration and allows you to quickly deploy a virtualization infrastructure for servers and workstations and includes tools for management, clustering, resource sharing, migration and work with storage systems.
Linux Mint Debian 4 distribution is being prepared for release
In addition to Linux Mint 20, which will be released this year and will be based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the Linux Mint team is preparing Linux Mint Debian 4 (LMDE) based on the Debian 10 distribution. From the new one, support for HiDPI matrices and improvements from the Mint X-Apps subproject are promised , Cinnamon desktop, encryption, support for NVIDIA cards and more.
Miscellanea
It refers indirectly to FOSS, but I could not help but mention it, especially in connection with the news from CERN that was analyzed above.
January 28th was International Day for the Protection of Personal Data. On the same day, the new Minister of Digital Development, Telecommunications and Mass Media of Russia, Maksut Shadayev, proposed providing the security forces with online access to various data of Russians (). Previously, such access was apparently not so simple.
And the trend is that we are becoming more and more “under the hood”. For those who care about privacy “guaranteed” by the Constitution, personal and family secrets, privacy of correspondence, and so on, once again the question arises of choosing what to use and whom to trust. Here, more than ever, decentralized network FOSS solutions and, in general, free and open software are becoming relevant. However, this is a topic for a separate review.
That's all.
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Source: habr.com