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Tuesday, June 9th, 2020
| Time |
Event |
| 2:11p |
Plasma 5.19 released Version 5.19 of the KDE Plasma desktop is out. " In this release, we have prioritized
making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets
and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop
by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved
usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall
more pleasurable experience." | | 3:06p |
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libpam-tacplus), Gentoo (gnutls), Oracle (unbound), Scientific Linux (freerdp and unbound), and SUSE (firefox, java-11-openjdk, java-1_7_0-openjdk, java-1_8_0-openjdk, nodejs10, and ruby2.1). | | 5:58p |
'The world is really changing': Why Linux on desktop is taking a sudden leap forward (TechRepublic)
TechRepublic interviewed Lenovo's general manager and executive director of the Workstation & Client AI Group Rob Herman about the company's plans to begin optionally pre-loading enterprise versions of the Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux distributions across its P Series ThinkPad and ThinkStation products, putting Linux on parity with Microsoft Windows for those product lines. "'Around the workstation and what I would call the performance computing world, the world is really changing [...] We're starting to see a lot more use of data science and AI workloads on performance client products like workstations, [and] we're seeing software development need the ability for more customization and flexibility.' This is where Linux and the power of open source come into the picture, says Herman. This is particularly crucial in artificial intelligence data science and content creation applications, areas Lenovo is eager to tap. 'Overall, we see content creators looking for an edge, looking for a new way, a new platform to develop on,' says Herman. 'The number of Linux users is increasing year on year, so from a market standpoint, we see it's the right time to do it.'" | | 7:03p |
The "special register buffer data sampling" hardware vulnerability We have not had a new CPU vulnerability for a little while — a situation
that was clearly too good to last. The mainline kernel has just merged
mitigations for the "special register buffer data sampling" vulnerability
which, in short, allows an attacker to spy on the random numbers obtained
by others. In particular, the results of the RDRAND instruction
can be obtained via a speculative attack.
The mitigation involves more flushing and the serialization of
RDRAND. That means a RDRAND instruction will take longer
to run, but it also means that RDRAND requires locking across the
system, which will slow things considerably if it is executed frequently.
There are ways to turn the mitigations off, of course. See this new kernel document for more
information.
These fixes are currently queued to be part of the
5.7.2,
5.6.18,
5.4.46,
4.19.128,
4.14.184
4.9.227,
4.4.227, and
3.16.85
stable updates. | | 10:53p |
Second Debian Med COVID-19 hackathon The Debian Med team joined a COVID-19 Biohackathon last April and is
planing on doing it again on June 15-21.
A recently shared pre-publication draft paper highlights which
software tools are considered useful "to Accelerate SARS-CoV-2 and
Coronavirus Research". Many of these tools would benefit from being
packaged in Debian and all the advantages that Debian brings for both
users and upstream alike.
As in the first sprint most tasks do not require any knowledge of
biology or medicine, and all types of contributions are welcome: bug
triage, testing, documentation, CI, translations, packaging, and code
contributions.
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