Canonical brings some bling to the Internet of Things with Snap-happy Ubuntu Core 18 release • The Register Forums

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Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

Thanks to Linux wunderkind Rudra Saraswat, not Canonical, this time

Liam Proven in Prague Fri 1 Jul 2022 // 16:33 UTC

Good news for especially determined fans of Ubuntu's formerly in-house desktop: there's a new version.
Unity 7.6 just appeared, although there is a more complete list of changes in the earlier announcement that it was in testing.

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Ubuntu releases Core 22: Its IoT and edge distro

A tougher nut to crack than the regular flavor, some will find it very tasty

Liam Proven in Prague Fri 17 Jun 2022 // 07:33 UTC

Canonical's Linux distro for edge devices and the Internet of Things, Ubuntu Core 22, is out.
This is the fourth release of Ubuntu Core, and as you might guess from the version number, it's based on the current Long Term Support release of Ubuntu, version 22.04.
Ubuntu Core is quite a different product from normal Ubuntu, even the text-only Ubuntu Server. Core has no conventional package manager, just Snap, and the OS itself is built from Snap packages. Snap installations and updates are transactional: this means that either they succeed completely, or the OS automatically rolls them back, leaving no trace except an entry in a log file.

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Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 is coming: Do you have one of the older model phones that can test it?

Linux fondleslab effort continues to update 16.04-based phone/tablet distro

Liam Proven in Prague Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 17:46 UTC

The UBPorts community is in the final stages of preparing its next release and it's calling for testers.
OTA-23 is getting close – the project's Github kanban looks quite good to us – and if you're lucky enough to have one of the project's supported devices lying around, then you can help.
Many of them are a few years old now, so there's a good chance that you've already replaced them and they sit unloved and neglected in a drawer. The starred entries in the list of devices are the best supported and should have no show-stopping problems. In order of seniority, that means: the LG-made Google Nexus 5 (2013); the original Oneplus One (2014); two models of Sony Xperia X, the F5121 and F5122 (2016); and Google's Pixel 3a and 3a XL (2019).

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I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Fragmentation has put paid to the dream of this OS ever being bigger than Windows

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols Wed 8 Jun 2022 // 08:30 UTC

Comment Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take.
Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 – count 'em – Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop.

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Linus Torvalds says Rust is coming to the Linux kernel 'real soon now'

Maintainer lack of familiarity won't be an issue, chief insists, citing his own bafflement when faced with Perl

Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 19:30 UTC

At The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, Linus Torvalds said he expects support for Rust code in the Linux kernel to be merged soon, possibly with the next release, 5.20.
At least since last December, when a patch added support for Rust as a second language for kernel code, the Linux community has been anticipating this transition, in the hope it leads to greater stability and security.
In a conversation with Dirk Hohndel, chief open source officer at Cardano, Torvalds said the patches to integrate Rust have not yet been merged because there's far more caution among Linux kernel maintainers than there was 30 years ago.

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The App Gap and supply chains: Purism CEO on what's ahead for the Librem 5 USA

Freedoms eroded, iOS-Android duopoly under fire, chip sources questioned – it's all an opportunity for this phone

Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Sat 2 Jul 2022 // 10:07 UTC

Interview In June, Purism began shipping a privacy-focused smartphone called Librem 5 USA that runs on a version of Linux called PureOS rather than Android or iOS. As the name suggests, it's made in America – all the electronics are assembled in its Carlsbad, California facility, using as many US-fabricated parts as possible.
While past privacy-focused phones, such as Silent Circle's Android-based Blackphone failed to win much market share, the political situation is different now than it was seven years ago.
Supply-chain provenance has become more important in recent years, thanks to concerns about the national security implications of foreign-made tech gear. The Librem 5 USA comes at a cost, starting at $1,999, though there are now US government agencies willing to pay that price for homegrown hardware they can trust – and evidently tech enthusiasts, too.

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FabricScape: Microsoft warns of vuln in Service Fabric

Not trying to spin this as a Linux security hole, surely?

Richard Speed Wed 29 Jun 2022 // 13:40 UTC

Microsoft is flagging up a security hole in its Service Fabric technology when using containerized Linux workloads, and urged customers to upgrade their clusters to the most recent release.
The flaw is tracked as CVE-2022-30137, an elevation-of-privilege vulnerability in Microsoft's Service Fabric. An attacker would need read/write access to the cluster as well as the ability to execute code within a Linux container granted access to the Service Fabric runtime in order to wreak havoc.
Through a compromised container, for instance, a miscreant could gain control of the resource's host Service Fabric node and potentially the entire cluster.

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EndeavourOS Artemis: Arch Linux, but a bit friendlier

The Reg FOSS desk takes the latest release, 22.6, for a spin

Liam Proven in Prague Wed 29 Jun 2022 // 11:39 UTC

EndeavourOS is a rolling-release Linux distro based on Arch Linux. Although the project is relatively new, having started in 2019, it's the successor to an earlier Arch-based distro called Antergos, so it's not quite as immature as its youth might imply. It's a little more vanilla than Antergos was – for instance, it uses the Calamares cross-distro installer.
EndeavourOS hews more closely to its parent distro than, for example, Manjaro, which we looked at very recently. Unlike Manjaro, it doesn't have its own staging repositories or releases. It installs packages directly from the upstream Arch repositories, using the standard Arch package manager pacman. It also bundles yay to easily fetch packages from the Arch User Repository, AUR. The yay command takes the same switches as pacman does, so if you wanted to install, say, Google Chrome, it's as simple as yay -s google-chrome and a few seconds later, it's done.

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WSL2 on Windows Server 2022 hits Windows Update

Devs who like a Linux flavor to their server code get a gift from Redmond

Richard Speed Wed 22 Jun 2022 // 18:30 UTC

Microsoft has made it official. Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 distributions are now supported on Windows Server 2022.
The technology emerged in preview form last month and represented somewhat of an about-face from the Windows giant, whose employees had previously complained that while the tech was handy for desktop users, sticking it on a server might mean it gets used for things for which it wasn't intended.
(And Windows Server absolutely had to have the bloated user interface of its desktop stablemate as well, right?)

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Leading Arch Linux derivative Manjaro puts out version 21.3

A simpler, easier remix sounds like a good thing, but glitches like these shouldn't be in a point release

Liam Proven in Prague Wed 22 Jun 2022 // 08:30 UTC

Version 21.3 of Manjaro - codenamed "Ruah" - is here, with kernel 5.15, but don't let its beginner-friendly billing fool you: you will need a clue with this one.
Manjaro Linux is one of the more popular Arch Linux derivatives, and the new version 21.3 is the latest update to version 21, released in 2021. There are three official variants, with GNOME 42.2, KDE 5.24.5 or Xfce 4.16 desktops, plus community builds with Budgie, Cinnamon, MATE, a choice of tiling window managers (i3 or Sway), plus a Docker image.
The Reg took its latest look at Arch Linux a few months ago. Arch is one of the older rolling-release distros, and it's also famously rather minimal. The installation process isn't trivial: it's driven from the command line, and the user does a lot of the hard work, manually partitioning disks and so on.

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