Historical Week for Debian and Ubuntu (a Look Back)
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-02-15 11:34:24 UTC
- Modified: 2014-02-15 11:34:24 UTC
Summary: A roundup of news about Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives of Ubuntu
Debian
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The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian 7 (codename "wheezy"). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available. Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian 7 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old "wheezy" CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.
Systemd in Debian
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Since this weekend we have known that systemd was winning the Debian init system battle, but now it's official: systemd has prevailed over Upstart in Debian.
After a very heated fight between the Debian technical committee and also Debian stakeholders, Bdale Garbee as the chairman of the tech committee has announced systemd will be used in Debian 8.0 Jessie.
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systemd already has a wide adoption withing the GNU/Linux distribution with all major distros including openSUSE, Fedora, Arch Linux, etc using it as their default init system. Upstart was either way not getting much support from the free software community due to the restrictive CLAs Canonical requires which is often criticized by the community. With Debian going* for systemd, it will get even more developer power whereas Canonical will be left alone to deal with Upstart along with many more project that it’s trying to do on its own – including the recently discussed File Manager which may replace Nautilus (Files).
Systemd in Ubuntu
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Going forward, systemd will be Debian's default init system for Linux distributions, an init system soon to be used by every other major Linux distribution other than Ubuntu.
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With this move Canonical has slowed the alienation of Ubuntu from the rest of the Linux community. It also shows that Canonical also understand that it can’t fork it’s path too much from the mainstream Linux community, especially from mommy Debian. In a nutshell it’s a wise and welcome decision by Ubuntu leadership and will help them focus on more pressing issues which will help make Ubuntu better.
Systemd
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My view is that this idea is wrong: systemd is broken by design, and despite offering highly enticing improvements over legacy init systems, it also brings major regressions in terms of many of the areas Linux is expected to excel: security, stability, and not having to reboot to upgrade your system.
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As usual in these cases, not just Lennart, but many of those who supported him, also those who sponsored these efforts, has suffered all kind of attacks. Sadly not just for technical, I mean ATTACKS. Even journalists have been involved. Yes, Free Software is also mature enough to have "yellow (technical) press" associated, political and business interests and people in different communities willing to use them against anybody who threaten the current status quo.
Mobile
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Vodafone joined Ubuntu’s Carrier Advisory Group, as Ubuntu demoed progress on a unified desktop/mobile UI, but a Debian decision may further isolate Ubuntu.
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One of Canonical's main goals in bringing Ubuntu to mobile devices is to create a converged platform across smartphones, tablets, and PCs. As such, a developer should be able to write an app that has a single code base yet runs on all three types of devices, presenting a different interface to the user on each form factor.
Licence Agreement
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Canonical has issued an official explanation for the reason why Linux Mint developers have to sign a license agreement in order to continue to distribute the package straight from the Ubuntu repos.
Valve
LTS
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After this weekend sharing benchmarks of the recent Ubuntu 12.04 LTS point releases, here's some complementary tests that offer a look at the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" performance against the current state of the "Trusty Tahr", a.k.a. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
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The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS
(Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products,
as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.
Development
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Last week I was in Orlando sprinting with my team as well as the platform, SDK, and security teams and some desktop and design folks. As usual after a sprint, I have been slammed catching up with email, but I wanted to provide a summary of some work going that you can expect to see soon in the Ubuntu app developer platform.
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The Ubuntu Developer Summit is the primary place where we discuss, debate, and plan the future of Ubuntu. The entire event takes place online, is open and accessible to all, and every session is recorded so everyone can see how decisions are made. It is a useful, fun, and rewarding event to join.
Ubuntu Variants
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Various flavors of Ubuntu 14.04 have come out today with their Trusty Tahr Alpha 2 spins.
Bodhi Linux
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We are huge fans of Jeff Hoogland’s work as a Software Developer and his efforts with Bodhi Linux. So we invited Jeff for a quick chat with Unixmen Australia. We were privileged when Jeff accepted our invitation. Here is what he had to say.
Linux Mint
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It’s no great secret that our organization Reglue uses Linux Mint on many of our outgoing computers. I run Mint on one of my work computers and at home as well. Linux Mint has given us the opportunity to create a respin for educational purposes within our non profit, largely due to an app named mintConstructor. It provides a fairly simple method of making custom systems using Linux Mint as the base.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- [Meme] Smart Alec Poettering
- How many Microsofters can the Debian Project withstand?
- Getting Rid of Microsoft Does Not Go Far Enough
- Microsoft already has many problems. One day Microsoft won't exist anymore. But that does not guarantee users' freedom.
- Alyssa Rosenzweig's LibrePlanet Talk About Freeing the Apple GPU
- Alyssa Rosenzweig is the graphics witch behind the reverse-engineered drivers for the Apple GPU. She previously led Panfrost, the free drivers for Arm Mali GPUs powering devices like the Pinebook Pro. She graduated in 2023 with a Computer Science degree from the University of Toronto and now writes free software full-time.
- Links 30/06/2024: LLMs Under Fire and Dictatorship of the Old
- Links for the day
- [Meme] Walking Outside the Guardrails of the Walled Gardens Built by Monopolies
- So-called "advertiser-unfriendly" material was never a problem for Wikileaks
- This War Crime Footage, Nothing Political Per Se, Is What They Made Julian Assange Plead Guilty To (War Criminals Not Convicted, Only Those Who Expose Them)
- Wikileaks' Julian Assange: Exposing the US Military Crimes
- 20 Years Passed, Let's Go Even Faster Now
- We are hoping to bring more original stories
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- Not Just Slow News But Also Late News (Julian Assange Landing in Thailand)
- Why did AP take so long (nearly a week) to release these?
- Eko K. A. Owen, New Outreach and Communications Coordinator for the FSF
- Nice to see many new additions to the FSF's team
- Microsoft Has Slaves and Enablers, Not Partners
- Obligatory meme too
- Windows in Åland Islands: From 100% to Less Than Half
- Åland Islands lost the sense of urgency to move to GNU/Linux
- Tobias Platen Covered Freedom-To-Play Games in LibrePlanet 2024
- Freedom-To-Play games using Taler
- [Meme] Opening a 'Webapp' With 'Only' 4 GB of RAM
- Until 2020 none of my PCs ever had more than 2 GB of RAM
- Destination 'Five Percent'
- We reckon GNU/Linux can break the 5% barrier some time by the end of this year, even without counting Chromebooks
- A Crisis of Online Journalism
- Almost a week ago a journalist was forced to plead guilty for an act of journalism
- Germany One of Many Countries Where Microsoft's Bing Lost Market Share After All That LLM Nonsense (Bing Chat and Further Rebrands/Renames)
- openai.com traffic plunged 60% last month
- Microsoft’s Latest Antitrust Scrutiny
- 4 new stories
- Microsoft Layoffs, Mass Plagiarism, and More
- outrage included
- GNU/Linux Climbed 0.25% This Month (in statCounter)
- Around midday on Tuesday we'll start seeing preliminary data for July
- Ilya Gulko Introduces Pollyanna
- "Pollyanna is a web framework that makes it easy to create your own libre social space, such as a social network or blog."
- 'FSFE': Underage Labour, GAFAM Fronting, and Identity Theft to Undermine the FSF's Current Fundraiser
- looking to raise funds at the same time as the FSF
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 29, 2024
- IRC logs for Saturday, June 29, 2024
- Links 29/06/2024: Astronauts at Risk, Ukraine Updates
- Links for the day
- Fedora and Red Hat Leftovers
- mostly redhat.com
- Microsoft is Now Googlebombing or Spamming 'Open Source' and 'Linux' to Promote Proprietary Surveillance, Azure
- Notice the title and the image, what's being promoted etc.
- Seychelles: GNU/Linux Doing OK
- Seychelles cannot be considered poor
- Gemini Protocol Isn't Even Remotely "Dead"
- "Lupa knows of 505,000 (half a million!) working Gemini URLs at present, up from about 425,000 this time last year"
- About 10 New Free Software Foundation (FSF) Members Per Day
- The total changed from 46 to 47 while typing the article
- Vista 11 Adoption Unusually Low in Germany and It's Going Down, Not Up
- This is not happening only in Germany
- Kevin Korte on Computers Being Allowed to Make Decisions Based on Cryptic Algorithms and Proprietary/Secret Data
- It uses buzzwords where none are needed
- [Meme] Garbage In, Garbage Out (linuxsecurity.com)
- It is neither Linux nor security, just chatbot-generated slop
- Microsoft-Invaded CISA Spreads Anti-Free Software FUD (as If Proprietary Software Has No Memory Safety Issues), Brittany Day Uses Chatbots to Amplify and Permutate the Microsoft FUD
- linuxsecurity.com became an anti-Linux spam site
- Microsoft Laying Off Staff in an Act of Retaliation and Union-Busting
- retaliatory layoffs at Microsoft
- Gemini Links 29/06/2024: Content Drowning in 'Goo' and LLM Slop
- Links for the day
- Windows Lost Almost 92% Market Share in Egypt
- From over 99% to just over 7%
- In Ecuador, GNU/Linux Adoption Surged From Under 1% to Over 4% in About 3 Years
- Not even counting Chromebooks
- LibrePlanet: Cultivating Backups (of Recordings)
- an appeal to recover some of these talks
- Microsoft/Windows Machines Are Turned Off (or Windows Deleted/Decommissioned) in Web Servers, as the "Market Share" Collapse Continues
- Taking full history into account, this is a decrease of over 90% in some cases
- Corwin Brust Hosting Freedom: A Behind-the-scenes Tour With the GNU Savannah Hackers
- "the "smiling faces" behind it."
- Android at 90% or More in Chad
- Windows below 2%
- David Wilson: Cultivating a Welcoming Free Software Community That Lasts
- "a feeling of shared ownership for all users."
- Julian Assange Might Continue Wikileaks, But Certainly Not Yet (Recovery Time Needed)
- And probably at a symbolic capacity only
- Bringing in 12 Santas and Taking 13 Out (Old Interview With Julian Assange)
- Julian Assange's life inside the Ecuadorian embassy
- Neil Plotnick on GNU/Linux in the High School Classroom
- uploaded to the LibrePlanet instance of MediaGoblin
- Asia Appears to be Fastest to Adopt GNU/Linux
- the home of a considerable majority of the world's population
- Alexandre Oliva's LibrePlanet 2024 Talk About "Software Enshittification"
- in spite of technical difficulties encountered while recording
- What They Used to Do With Mono They Now Do With Systemd (Lower and Deeper Down Than Userspace)
- Now we have a project started primarily by Red Hat (and managed by Microsoft GitHub, which is proprietary) being managed by Microsoft and primarily serving Microsoft and IBM
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 28, 2024
- IRC logs for Friday, June 28, 2024
- Links 28/06/2024: Kangaroo Courts and Patents Spam, EFF Still Fighting for CPC's TikTok (a Digital Weapon)
- Links for the day
- Links 28/06/2024: Overton window and Polarization
- Links for the day
- [Meme] In 50 Years...
- Microsoft's Vista 11 will take 50 years to be fully adopted
- Only About 1 in 8 Russian Windows Users is Using Vista 11
- it looks like over the past 12 months Vista 11 hardly grew and it remains very low at around 12% of Windows usage in Russia
- Links 28/06/2024: More Attacks on the Press, More Censorship in Russia
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 28/06/2024: Christmas Prematurely, Self-hosting
- Links for the day
- IBM: So Long, Suckers. Your Free OS is Now Proprietary. Pay IBM or Else.
- almost exactly a year after turning RHEL into proprietary software
- Vista 11 is Doomed and Despite Lack of Adoption Microsoft Already Speaks of Vapourware ("12")
- "Microsoft has pulled a Windows 11 update after users reported boot loops and startup failures."
- ChromeOS Reaches Highest Share in Years at the World's Most Populous Nation, Windows Now at All-Time Low of 13%
- We're talking about India today
- [Video] "It Is Incredible That Julian Assange Survives"
- There was a positive and mutual relationship between Wikileaks and Dr Jill Stein
- Never Assume That Because the Law Exists the Powerful Will Follow the Law
- Who's going to hold them accountable now?
- Nearly a Month Has Passed and Nobody at the Debian Project Even Attempted to Explain What Seems Like Back-dooring of Debian (and Hundreds of Distros That Are Debian-Derived)
- I can cynically guess that only matters when a user with a Chinese name does it
- [Video] Julian Assange Explains Wikileaks' Logistics
- predating indefinite detention
- IBM Was Never the "Good Guy", Just a Self-Serving and Opportunistic Money- and Power-Hungry Monopolist, Living Off of Taxpayers' Money (Government Contracts)
- The Nazi Party of Germany was its second-biggest client at one point and now it's looking to profit from the work of slaves
- "I Hated Working at IBM. They Were the Most Unfriendly People."
- Don't forget what Watson the son did to a poor woman on a plane
- State of the News (and Depletion of Journalism Online, Not Just Offline)
- Newspapers are not coming back and the Web is not coming back either
- GNU/Linux Consolidates in North America
- Android rising a lot this year, too
- [Meme] More Monopolies Granted While Patent Examiners Die (Overworking for Less Compensation)
- Work more; Get less
- Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO) is Taking the New Pension Scheme (NPS) to an International Tribunal (ILOAT)
- SUEPO wants more EPO staff to participate in collective action
- Stella Assange and the Legal Team Speak to the Media a Day After WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Arrives in Australia
- Published yesterday by a number of mainstream publishers
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 27, 2024
- IRC logs for Thursday, June 27, 2024
- RIP Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Red Hat death
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock