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A February Wrap for the Raspberry Pi

By Isaac Carter on March 2, 2016 |

Distros, Hardware and News

A February Wrap for the Raspberry PiRaspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi Report

The Raspberry Pi managed to cram a lot of history into only 29 days this February, even without mentioning the introduction of the Pi 3 on Monday.

The month of February kept up with the trend of bigger and better things happening in the Raspberry Pi world. From new games to updates from the International Space Station, things keep moving on for the Raspbery Pi and the Raspberry Pi community. While quite a few things happened this past month, here’s a summation of the biggest stories.

Raspberry PiMore distros to choose from – February marked the arrivial of several new distros that Raspberry Pi users can now install. Tizen 3.0, Chromium 0.4 and Manjaro-ARM are available to download for the Raspberry Pi 2. The Manjaro-ARM project now allows Raspberry Pi users to enjoy Arch Linux without having to do an Arch install and is also broken down into four different editions. Media, Server, Basic and Minimal editions all cater to situations that most Raspberry Pi users fall into. Tizen users will be excited to see that Tizen 3.0 is now fully functional on the Raspberry Pi 2. This is a great move, since more users will be introduced to the Tizen platform who might not have had a chance to experience it before. Last, but not least is the release of Chromium 0.4. Chromium was already available, but with kernel improvements and more memory storage, version 0.4 is leaps and bounds ahead of Chromium 0.3

Continue readingA February Wrap for the Raspberry Pi
It’s Official! The Raspberry Pi 3 Is Here!Raspberry Pi 3

It’s Official! The Raspberry Pi 3 Is Here!

By Isaac Carter on February 29, 2016 |

Hardware and News

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has officially announced the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3, which is the first Pi to come with built-in wireless capabilities and a 64-bit processor.

The Pi Podcast was able to get an exclusive interview with Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton on what exactly is the Raspberry Pi 3 and how it stacks up to the rest of the Raspberry Pi lineup. Here’s the takeaway from the interview.

Raspberry Pi 3
Top view of the Raspberry Pi 3
Photo source: FCC
New processor: The previous processor was quad-core 32-bit Coretex ARMv7 at 900mhz. The Pi 3 brings to the table a quad-core 64-bit Coretex ARMv8 1200mhz. This processor was picked not so much because it was 64-bit, but rather because it was a better 32-bit core, which will allow users to still run 32-bit images on the new Pi 3. With the new processor, the Pi 3 is expected to show a 50-60 percent performance improvement over the Pi 2, which is quite impressive given the release time of the Pi 2 to the release time of the Pi 3.

Isaac Carter

In addition to hosting a Raspberry Pi meetup in Washington D.C., Isaac Carter is a co-host on mintCast. He’s also a software engineer who enjoys working with Java, JavaScript, and GNU/Linux. When he’s not coding, you can find him reading on any number of subjects or on the golf course.

Continue readingIt’s Official! The Raspberry Pi 3 Is Here!
Software Freedom Conservancy, Others, Makes Case for FOSS at NY City HallKaren Sandler Free Software Conservancy

Software Freedom Conservancy, Others, Makes Case for FOSS at NY City Hall

By Christine Hall on February 24, 2016 |

Community, News and Politics

On Tuesday, representatives of four FOSS friendly agencies testified before a New York City committee considering bills that would mandate the use of FOSS by city government.

“Free and open source software has many advantages over proprietary software,” Karen Sandler, the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, testified Tuesday before the New York City Council Committee on Contracts. “Studies show that, over time, free software is safer from vulnerabilities. Free software is auditable — security and functionality can be verified upon inspection. Anyone can independently assess the software and its risks. Developers can more easily and quickly repair discovered vulnerabilities or bugs (and bugs are very common in all software – the Software Engineering Institute estimates that an experienced software engineer produces approximately one defect for every 100 lines of code). Free software removes dependence on a single party, as anyone can make changes to their version of the software. And municipalities can hire any contractor on the open market to work on the software.”

Karen Sandler Free Software Conservancy
Karen Sandler, executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy and others at Tuesday’s hearing before the New York City Committee on Contracts.
She was speaking in support of two bills: the Free and Open Source Software Act, which “would minimize city contracts for proprietary software in favor of free and open source software that can be shared between government agencies and bodies,” and the Civic Commons Act, which “would encourage the collaborative software purchasing of free and open source software among agencies, cities and states to pool resources, avoid duplicated effort, create portable expertise, grow jobs, and reduce costs.” Both bills are sponsored by New York City councilman Ben Kallos, and both were originally introduced on May 29, 2014.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingSoftware Freedom Conservancy, Others, Makes Case for FOSS at NY City Hall
Linux Mint: Anatomy of a HackLinux Mint compromised download page

Linux Mint: Anatomy of a Hack

By Christine Hall on February 22, 2016 |

Distros, News and Security

The hackers who compromised the Linux Mint site on Saturday were evidently not the brightest stars in the dark web, but they managed to create a mess for the Mint crew to clear away.

Everybody understands that none of a stage magician’s tricks are real. The one thing that is real, and which a successful illusionist must practice to perfection, is the art of misdirection — which evidently turned out the be the trick under the sleeves of the cracker/hackers who were responsible for compromising ISO downloads of Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon on Saturday.

In the FOSS Force news article on the hack which ran Sunday, we said “the hackers modified the ISO of the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 17.3 (Rosa).” We now know that’s not quite true, or at least not in the way we meant. The hackers didn’t bust into the Mint server and modify the binaries waiting to be grabbed by the mirror sites for downloads. Instead, this was a case of misdirection.

The hackers had a copy of Mint with their malicious payload in place, packaged as an ISO image and sitting on a Bulgarian server they controlled, waiting to serve downloads of what is arguably the worlds most popular version of GNU/Linux. The intrusion at Mint was a quick in-and-out to change the URLs in the anchor tags on Mint’s download page for the 64-bit Cinnamon version of Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa.” Afterwards, users who clicked on a link to download from, say, the Internet Solutions mirror in South Africa, were taken to the hackers’ server in Bulgaria. Let the download begin. Wham, bam, thank you mam.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingLinux Mint: Anatomy of a Hack
Linux Mint Hacked: ISO for 17.3 Cinnamon Edition ModifiedLinux Mint Logo

Linux Mint Hacked: ISO for 17.3 Cinnamon Edition Modified

By FOSS Force on February 21, 2016 |

Distros, News and Security

An intrusion of the Linux Mint server on Saturday makes downloads performed on Saturday of version 17.3 Cinnamon potentially vulnerable.

Linux Mint project leader Clem Lefebvre revealed in a blog post today that the popular Linux distribution’s servers were hacked on Saturday. During the “brief” intrusion, the hackers modified the ISO of the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 17.3 (Rosa) and also gained access to the distro’s forum database. Only this particular ISO is affected; other editions or releases are considered safe. Only ISO’s downloaded Saturday are potentially vulnerable.

Continue readingLinux Mint Hacked: ISO for 17.3 Cinnamon Edition Modified
#codeforaubrey, WebKit Linux Risk & More…Aubrey Howell

#codeforaubrey, WebKit Linux Risk & More…

By Christine Hall on February 19, 2016 |

Browsers, Community, Distros, Hardware, Mobile, News and Operating Systems

FOSS Week in Review

The good news this week is that the latest Linux vulnerability finally scared me enough to take the time to fix the issues I’ve been having with the updater on the Linux box we use here at the office and get our machine up-to-date with all the latest patches. Other than that, it’s just been the usual, which can be summed-up as waiting for Godot, who so far remains a no show…

Now for this weeks roundup:

Often the best place to find hope is in the middle of despair. I think somebody famous once said that; if not, I’ll take credit for it. Anyway, there’s been an example of that adage this week which has me feeling…well, full of hope, and at the same time, concerned for someone I’ve never met.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue reading#codeforaubrey, WebKit Linux Risk & More…
FreeBSD, Variants Not Affected by Recent GNU BugBSD logo

FreeBSD, Variants Not Affected by Recent GNU Bug

By Larry Cafiero on February 18, 2016 |

News, Operating Systems and Security

Larry the BSD Guy

The glibc security vulnerability that Linux developers have been scrambling to patch does not affect *BSD.

Much has been made about a vulnerability in a function in the GNU C Library. And searching far and wide over the Internet, there was little — actually nothing — I could find regarding how this affected BSD variants.

However, you can rest easy, BSDers: Not our circus, not our monkeys.

Dag-Erling Smørgrav, a FreeBSD developer since 1998 and a former FreeBSD Security Officer, writes in his blog that “neither FreeBSD itself nor native FreeBSD applications are affected.”

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Continue readingFreeBSD, Variants Not Affected by Recent GNU Bug
LXer Suffering From Scattered OutagesLXer temporary landing page

LXer Suffering From Scattered Outages

By FOSS Force on February 15, 2016 |

Community, Internet, Media and News

Breaking News

Last updated Tuesday, February 16 at 12:15 a.m.

If you’ve been trying to get on LXer and having no luck, it’s not just you. Today the site is unreachable for at least much of the U.S.

The popular Linux and FOSS website LXer seems to be unreachable in many parts of the U.S. today. In the areas affected, users trying to reach the site are taken to a Network Solutions holding page instead.

We first became aware of the problem at about 7 a.m. EST when an attempt to access the site took us to a Network Solutions landing page. We had visited the site several times in the previous hour without difficulty. At about 8 a.m., access to the site returned briefly, but by 9 a.m. the site was again unreachable. We haven’t been able to access the site since.

LXer temporary landing page
Many of those attempting to visit the popular Linux and FOSS site “LXer” today are seeing this page instead.
Continue readingLXer Suffering From Scattered Outages
‘Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace’ Turns 20, Opera Fetches $1.2 Billion & More…Opera logo

‘Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace’ Turns 20, Opera Fetches $1.2 Billion & More…

By Christine Hall on February 12, 2016 |

Browsers, Community, Desktops, Distros, Internet and News

FOSS Week in Review Two important Internet events happened 20 years ago this week and a web browser gets an unexpected — to us —…

Continue reading‘Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace’ Turns 20, Opera Fetches $1.2 Billion & More…
Lumina Desktop Getting Ready for FreeBSD 11.0Lumina Desktop screenshot

Lumina Desktop Getting Ready for FreeBSD 11.0

By Larry Cafiero on February 11, 2016 |

Desktops and News

Larry the BSD Guy

The BSD licensed Lumina Desktop aims to release version 1.0 in July.

It appears the sun is rising on Lumina.

Ken Moore, the lead developer for the BSD-based Lumina Desktop Environment, announced that another step towards the release of a full-fledged desktop environment for BSD variants (and Linux distros, for that matter) has been achieved with the release of version 0.8.8 yesterday.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Lumina Desktop Environment — let’s just call it Lumina for short — is a lightweight, XDG-compliant, BSD-licensed desktop environment focusing on getting work done while minimizing system overhead. Specifically designed for PC-BSD and FreeBSD, it has also been ported to many other BSD variants and Linux distros. Lumina is based on the Qt graphical toolkit and the Fluxbox window manager, and uses a small number of X utilities for various tasks.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Continue readingLumina Desktop Getting Ready for FreeBSD 11.0

SCO v. IBM: Judge Rules for IBM in Interferance Claims

By Christine Hall on February 10, 2016 |

Business and News

Judge grants IBM’s request for summary judgement and orders parties to reach dismissal agreement by February 26.

Two SCO stories in a week? As Yogi Berra would say, it’s 2003 all over again. But this time with a big difference. It’s almost over.

I told you on Monday that Judge David Nuffer with the US District Court in Utah had shot down SCO’s attempts to bring an action for Unfair Competition against IBM because the issue is already covered by another breach of contract claim by SCO. On Tuesday, Judge Nuffer issued a ruling on a pair of interference claims which effectively takes whatever winds were left out of SCO’s sails.

Bankrupt SCO, of course, lost their big $1 billion case against IBM long ago when Novell, in a separate case, proved that it, and not SCO, owned the copyrights that SCO was suing over. But SCO’s been struggling to stay alive, hoping to at least win a few bucks from IBM as compensation for all it went through.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingSCO v. IBM: Judge Rules for IBM in Interferance Claims
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