Distributions
Brief items
Distribution quotes of the week
I'm also fine with the idea of instead making Rawhide itself the
more-carefully-gated thing (maybe with the automatic side-tag idea),
but last time we talked about this there seemed to be some preference
for leaving Rawhide as it is and making a new thing. I don't really
care as long as we call *something* Bikeshed.
— Matthew Miller
Ultimately though it probably
does need somebody who is really passionate about pull requests or
whatever to try to push it through. There are certainly those of us
on these lists with interests just as perverse as that...
— Rich Freeman
Not everyone is well disciplined: most Linux distributions seem to have
given up in disgust so we have parallel ecosystems which don't trust or
understand the other - but you need a Linux distribution to be able to run it.
— Andrew M.A. Cater
"My cat walked over my keyboard and accidentally upgraded my Fedora to 25.
And it works well!"
— Adam Samalik
Minoca OS goes open source
Minoca OS has been released under the GNU GPLv3. "Minoca OS is a general purpose operating system written completely from the ground up. It’s intended for devices looking to conserve power, memory, and storage. It aims to be lean, maintainable, modular, and compatible with existing software."
Distribution News
Debian GNU/Linux
dgit 2.9 - for everyone
Ian Jackson has announced the release of dgit 2., with a new set of tutorials. "dgit allows you to treat the Debian archive as if it were a git repository, and get a git view of any package. If you have the appropriate access rights you can do builds and uploads from git, and other dgit users will see your git history."
Release Architectures for Debian 9 'Stretch'
The release architectures for Debian 9 will be amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el, and s390x. "The only change from Jessie is the removal of powerpc as a release architecture. We discussed this at length, and eventually took the view that the least disservice to users of that port is to provide reasonable notice of its discontinuation. We recognise and acknowledge that discontinuing any port is unavoidably disruptive."
Gentoo Linux
Gentoo on Android stage3
Benda Xu has released a "Gentoo on Android" stage3 tarball. "The tarball runs Gentoo natively under /data/gentoo (:=EPREFIX) on a rooted android device newer than 2011 or armv7a, alongside the Android stack."
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat end-of-life notices
Red Hat has announced the retirement of Red Hat Enterprise Developer Toolset 3.x and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Extended Update Support. Red Hat will no longer provide updated packages, including critical impact security patches or urgent priority bug fixes, for these products.
Newsletters and articles of interest
Distribution newsletters
- DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 685 (October 31)
- Linux Mint Monthly News (October)
- Lunar Linux weekly news (October 28)
- openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Week (October 28)
- Ubuntu Kernel Team weekly newsletter (October 25)
- Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 485 (October 30)
The (updated) history of Android (Ars Technica)
Ars Technica covers the history of Android from version 0.5 to 7.0 "Nougat". "One of the most interesting additions to Nougat is a revamp of the app framework to allow for resizable apps. This allowed Google to implement split screen on phones and tablets, picture-in-picture on Android TV, and a mysterious floating windowed mode. We've been able to access the floating window mode with some software trickery, but we've yet to see Google use it in an actual product. Is it being aimed at desktop computing?"
Arch Linux: In a world of polish, DIY never felt so good (The Register)
The Register takes a look at Arch Linux. "The lack of a default set of applications and desktop system also does not make for tidy reviews - or reviews at all really, since what I install will no doubt be different to what you choose. I happened to select a very minimal setup of bare Openbox, tint2 and dmenu. You might prefer the latest release of GNOME. We'd both be running Arch, but our experiences of it would be totally different. This is of course true of any distro, but most others have a default desktop at least."
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