 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 844, 9 December 2019 |
Welcome to this year's 49th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! It doesn't happen often that a project with roots in BSD decides to switch its base system to Linux, so the shock decision taken by Project Trident to do just that has certainly risen a few eyebrows. But how is the transition going some two months after the announcement? Jesse Smith takes a look at Project Trident's first alpha release, now based on Void Linux, in the featured article of this week's DWW. In the news section, Debian releases the initial alpha build of its installer for "Bullseye", SparkyLinux creates a special portable edition of its distribution designed to run from a USB drive, Haiku works on improving support for 64-bit ARM processors, and OpenBSD publishes (and fixes) a number of security issues. Also on the security front, a group of researchers find a serious vulnerability in most recent Linux and BSD operating systems; it allows a bad actor to inject data into the TCP stream while using a virtual private network (VPN). As usual, you will also find a list of recent distribution releases and their respective torrents in the torrent corner below. Finally, don't miss our opinion poll which returns to the topic of the review: how do you feel about Project Trident's switch from BSD to Linux? We wish you all a great start of the week with the new issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Content:
- Review: Project Trident Void Alpha
- News: Debian releases alpha installer for "Bullseye", SparkyLinux creates portable edition, Haiku improves hardware and filesystem support, OpenBSD publishes four new security errata, VPN hijacking vulnerability on Linux and BSD
- Questions and answers: Dealing with massive log files being generated
- Released last week: CAINE 11.0, elementary OS 5.1, Tails 4.1, Univention Corporate Server 4.4-3
- Torrent corner: Arch, CAINE, Container, elementary OS, Endless OS, KDE neon, SmartOS, SparkyLinux, Tails, Univention
- Opinion poll: Project Trident migrating from FreeBSD/TrueOS to Void
- Reader comments
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (16MB) and MP3 (12MB) formats.
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Project Trident Void Alpha
Project Trident began its life as a desktop operating system which was based on TrueOS, a rolling release platform that was, in turn, based on FreeBSD's development branch. Trident features the Lumina desktop environment, a lightweight, portable desktop that was designed with BSD platforms in mind - in other words it avoids some dependencies which are tied to Linux.
Despite starting out as part of the FreeBSD family, Project Trident is migrating to a Linux base. Specifically, future versions of Trident will be based on Void. The Void project also provides a rolling release platform and a lightweight foundation. In addition, Void's Linux core will provide a wider range of hardware support which the Trident project hopes to leverage. What does the Void community get in return? Trident plans to support ZFS on root, an easy to set up desktop, the portable Lumina applications, and fresh network-install media. Details on the migration can be found on the Project Trident blog. Migration from one base to the other will not be supported due to the major differences between the FreeBSD and Void operating systems.
Right now Trident's new Void edition is in its early stages and is considered alpha software. Usually I don't like to run development releases, but I was curious to see how the new Void-based Trident was measuring up against the FreeBSD flavour of Trident, which I had run earlier in the year. Going into the trial I noticed the project is up front about some features that have not been ported yet. ZFS on root is available, but boot environments are not. Multi-boot is not supported as the installer wants to take over an entire disk. The Lumina desktop is reportedly available, but Lumina's various desktop applications have not been ported yet. At install time we are told to expect access to just a root account and we can add regular user accounts later.
Installing
The alpha snapshot of Trident's Void edition is 502MB and runs on 64-bit (x86_64) machines exclusively. Booting from the media brings up a text-based menu where we are given the chance to scan for wireless networks or drop to a command line. Once we are connected to a wireless network (or the system has picked up a wired network automatically) we are given the option to install the operating system.
On the next text screen a menu appears and asks us to select one of our computer's disks to use as the root partition. We are then asked if we would like 1, 2, 4, or 8GB of swap space. Choosing no swap space is also an option. The installer next asks if we would prefer to install packages built with the glibc or the musl libraries. The glibc library is the default and the one I selected. The musl library, we are told, will not work with proprietary packages. We then make up a password for the root account, assign a hostname to our computer and make up a name for our ZFS storage pool. With these steps completed, the installer downloads packages over the network and builds the ZFS kernel module from its source code. The whole process took about half an hour in my case. At first I thought the ZFS build process had failed as no progress information was shown while ZFS was compiling, but eventually the build finished and I was asked to reboot the computer.
Early impressions
Trident boots to a text console where we can sign in as the root user. The root account uses Dash as the default shell. We can change this as Dash is somewhat limited in its features, better suited for speed and running scripts than interacting with the user. When we make new user accounts, which can be done with the useradd command, the new (non-root) users are set up with the Bash shell.
Exploring the command line interface I found we have access to the GNU userland utilities and the XBPS package manager, which I will explore more later. Manual pages are included for command line programs, the GNU Compiler Collection is installed, and version 5.3.9 of the Linux kernel is running behind the scenes. Trident, like its Void base, uses the runit init software which I found to be unusually fast. The runit start-up and shutdown processes are some of the fastest I have experienced.
According to Trident's website we should be able to start a graphical desktop session by running startx from the command line. When I tried this, I found X.Org would begin to start and then quickly crash. Looking into this a bit I believed it was because the packages for video drivers and input devices, such as the xorg-video-drivers package, were not installed by default.
I tried installing these drivers, then more support packages, and a window manager and, in the end, X.Org still failed to start. It may be possible to get it running but since there isn't much to trouble-shoot with and not much documentation yet for Trident's Void branch, it is an uphill battle. This left me to explore the distribution from the command line.
Software management
Trident works with Void's package management tools. The xbps-install tool installs and upgrades packages while xbps-query helps us find new software. I found the XBPS utilities to be fast and straight forward to use. The syntax is sometimes at odds with other package managers, but I found they got the job done.
I only had a few updates during the days I was playing with Trident. These updates amounted to about 1MB in size and they were applied without any issues.
Hardware
I did almost all of my experimenting with Trident's Void edition in a VirtualBox environment. I did not want to hand over my entire hard drive to Trident, at least not while it is still in its alpha stages, so I installed it in a virtual machine and tried the live environment on my physical workstation. Apart from the issue of getting a desktop environment running (despite installing X.Org drivers and VirtualBox guest modules) Trident ran smoothly in the virtual machine. The operating system was surprisingly fast to perform tasks, boot, and shutdown.
When I tried the live disc on my workstation, Trident was able to detect my computer's hardware and connect to a wireless network. The live media does not have a desktop interface yet, but I could connect wirelessly, install packages from the repositories, and browse the contents of local disks.
Trident, when running from a command line, uses a fairly small amount of memory (150MB) and a fresh install takes just 1.1GB of disk space, plus however much storage we assign to be swap space.
While Trident's Void edition does not yet support boot environments, which would let us roll back changes to the operating system at boot time, the system does allow us access to the full range of ZFS features. We can add new disks to increase storage volume, create snapshots, and send snapshots across the network. The filesystem is set up with root, /home, swap, and a few /var sub-volumes. This makes it easier to take separate snapshots of our home directories and operating system, making restoring and transferring snapshots more efficient.
Conclusions
As one should expect with an initial alpha release, Trident's Void branch is not yet ready for the general public. At the moment it is more of a proof of concept - that Void's base can be set up with an alternative installer and use ZFS on root. It's a good beginning, but I suspect there are still a few months to go before Trident's new branch will provide a live desktop and boot environments. When that happens, I think Trident will offer a good experience, and the ZFS snapshots will provide insurance against broken updates from Void's rolling repositories. For now Trident's Void branch is an interesting idea and I hope it gets rounded out by the time a stable release happens early in 2020.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications:
- Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card, Ralink RT5390R PCIe Wireless card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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Visitor supplied rating
Project Trident has a visitor supplied average rating of: 10/10 from 1 review(s).
Have you used Project Trident? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith and Ladislav Bodnar) |
Debian releases alpha installer for "Bullseye", SparkyLinux creates portable edition, Haiku improves hardware and filesystem support, OpenBSD publishes four new security errata, VPN hijacking vulnerability on Linux and BSD
 The release of Debian 11 is still a long way off, but the developers are already updating and testing the distribution's installation program. The initial alpha release of the Debian installer for "Bullseye", the code name of the project's next stable release, is available for testing: "The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 11 'Bullseye'. It's high time we started doing this: many components were updated, replacing 'CD'/'CD-ROM' with 'installation media'. Such changes are not documented individually below. That also explains why many languages are not fully translated in this alpha release. Improvements in this release: apt-setup - update generation of apt sources lines for security renamed from dist/updates to dist-security; base-installer - stop installing the apt-transport-https transitional package; brltty - stop creating my-at-spi-dbus-bus.desktop in user profile...." Cyril Brulebois outlines other changes to the installer, which currently supports an impressive number of 76 languages, in this mailing list post. If you are interested in testing the new installer, you are welcome to download the usual range of Debian installation media from the Debian Installer page.
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 The SparkyLinux team have announced the release of a new edition, called Sparky Bonsai. The new edition, like other SparkyLinux flavours, is based on Debian and is designed to be run from a USB thumb drive rather than installed on a computer's hard drive. This allows users to take their operating system with them and boot into it wherever they go. "Sparky Bonsai lives in a USB flash 4GB minimum and run with 512 MB of RAM on x86 processors. At the moment it's only available in a 64-bit version. It fits on a DVD or CD optical disk and runs in ext2/3/4, FAT32, XFS, exFAT filesystems. In order to load it to RAM, 1GB is recommended. It is a minimal Debian Buster file system using Debian Linux kernel 4.19.0.6 with the BusterDog's modules for Porteus boot, live-boot-3x and Aufs support." Additional details can be found in Sparky Bonsai – a portable edition of SparkyLinux.
* * * * *
 The Haiku developers have been working on a lot of behind-the-scenes changes over the past two months. Two of the key areas of focus have been introducing write support for Btrfs storage volumes and improving 64-bit ARM process support. "Part of the work done by brjhaiku on Btrfs write support for Google Summer of Code has been merged. Nothing very exciting for end-users here, but at least we have a working and documented btrfs_shell to experiment with the code. Some time ago, a large set of patches preparing for ARM64 have been submitted by Jaroslaw Pelczar. These are a rework of an earlier and more invasive porting attempt, which could not be merged as-is because it had compatibility problems with other platforms. The code is slowly being reviewed and merged a small piece at a time. So far, it is mostly changes required to get Haiku to compile, without much in terms of actual added functionality or support." These changes, along with several others, are detailed in the project's monthly newsletter.
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 The OpenBSD project published four security errata during the past week. The last of them, revealed on 8 December, allows a user to log in to a OpenBSD system with a different user's login class. The vulnerability affects all architectures, but a source code patch is already available to remedy the issue. Other security errata published during the week include environment-provided paths are used for dlopen() in mesa, libc's authentication layer performed insufficient username validation, xenodm uses the libc authentication layer incorrectly. It's interesting to note that OpenBSD has published no fewer than 12 security errata since the release of OpenBSD 6.6 on 17 October 2019, an usually high number for a project that has a stated goal of being the number one most secure operating system on the market.
* * * * *
 Speaking of security issues, a serious vulnerability affecting VPN users on Linux has been discovered by William J. Tolley. The author notes that most Linux distributions are vulnerable, especially those that "use a version of systemd pulled after November 28th of last year which turned reverse path filtering off.". The report, which was assigned a CVE number CVE-2019-14899, reads: "We have discovered a vulnerability in Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS, iOS, and Android which allows a malicious access point, or an adjacent user, to determine if a connected user is using a VPN, make positive inferences about the websites they are visiting, and determine the correct sequence and acknowledgement numbers in use, allowing the bad actor to inject data into the TCP stream. This provides everything that is needed for an attacker to hijack active connections inside the VPN tunnel. This vulnerability works against OpenVPN, WireGuard, and IKEv2/IPSec, but has not been thoroughly tested against tor, but we believe it is not vulnerable since it operates in a SOCKS layer and includes authentication and encryption that happen in userspace." The report also provides a list of distributions affected by this vulnerability, including Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Arch Linux, Manjaro Linux, Devuan, MX Linux, Void Linux, Slackware Linux, Deepin, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. See this Linux Weekly News post for further details.
* * * * *
These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Dealing with massive log files being generated
Purging-large-log-files asks: I have a log file that is growing super fast in /var/log and don't know what's making it. The file is growing about a GB every few minutes. How do I find out what program is making it and stop it?
DistroWatch answers: There are a few approaches you can take to try to figure out what program is writing to the log file and put a stop to it. The easiest approach may be to look inside the log file to see what is being written to it. If you see a lot of lines referring to blocked access attempts it may be a firewall log. However, if you see a lot of references to package versions you may be dealing with a runaway update script. Knowing what is in the rapidly growing file will probably give a clue as to what is making it.
Another approach you can try is to run the lsof command. The lsof program will provide a list of programs which currently have a specific file open. For instance, running the following command will provide a list of all programs that have the /var/log/boot log open:
lsof /var/log/boot
Hopefully the lsof command will provide the name of the program which is writing to your log file. This should work if the log file is being written to constantly, but if it is not, then we may need to take another approach and attempt to find the culprit by process of elimination.
If the logfile is growing constantly it is probably being generated by a background service or running application. Closing running applications and disabling any unneeded services one at a time while watching the size of the log file may tell you which process is causing the problem. On the other hand, if the log file only grows periodically, perhaps once an hour, then the cause is more likely a systemd timer or cron job. Checking the crontabs on the system and/or the systemd timer units will likely reveal what job is being run and growing the log.
Assuming one of the above methods helps you find out which process is generating all the log entries, what can you do about it? There are three simple approaches you can try, ones that will not involve containers, virtual machines, or changes to service manager options.
The first is very straight forward: stop and, optionally, uninstall the software that is creating the massive log file. This is the most simple solution, though if you need the process for whatever reason, it is not a practical one.
The second solution is to see if the program which is writing all the log entries has an option to disable logging. A lot of services have a flag in their configuration file which indicates whether to log data and, if so, where. Check the manual page for your verbose process and see if logging can be turned off.
However, if none of the above solutions work there is another approach you can take. It is not ideal, but will prevent your filesystem from filling up with this giant log file. What we can do is remove the log file and replace it with a virtual device which discards all data sent to it. This is what the /dev/null file does, it is a black hole that soaks up all data and merely throws it away. This allows the runaway process to believe it is writing to a log without any data being saved on your disk. Assuming you have a giant log file called /var/log/big-file this is how we can replace the log with a virtual device that discards all the data written to it:
rm /var/log/big-file
mknod -m=666 /var/log/big-file c 1 3
The above commands will need to be run as the root user or through a tool like sudo. This creates an unbuffered virtual device that throws away any data written to it. Anyone can write to this file and that is fine because nothing gets stored in it.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
CAINE 11.0
CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is an Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux live distribution created as a project of digital forensics. The project's latest release, CAINE 11.0, is based on Ubuntu 18.04 and reportedly supports booting on UEFI, Secure Boot, and Legacy BIOS devices. Version 11.0 includes a Btrfs forensic tool and limits access to all storage devices to read-only mode. "Important changes: All devices are blocked in Read-Only mode, by default. New tools, new OSINT, Autopsy 4.13 onboard, APFS ready,BTRFS foresic tool, NVME SSD drivers ready! SSH server disabled by default (see manual page for enabling it). SCRCPY - screen your Android device. Autopsy 4.13 + additional plugins by McKinnon. X11VNC Server - to control CAINE remotely. Hashcat. New scripts (in the Forensics Tools - Analysis menu). AutoMacTc - a forensics tool for Mac. Bitlocker - volatility plugin. Autotimeliner - automagically extract forensic timeline from volatile memory dumps. Firmwalker - firmware analyzer. CDQR - Cold Disk Quick Response tool." Further details can be found on the project's home page.
elementary OS 5.1
elementary OS is an Ubuntu-based desktop distribution. Some of its more interesting features include a custom desktop environment called Pantheon and a custom software centre. The project's latest release is elementary OS 5.1 "Hera", which introduces many package updates, a refreshed login screen, and an onboarding application to guide new users through available features. "The newly redesigned login and lockscreen greeter looks sharper, works better, and fixes many reported issues with the previous greeter including focus issues, HiDPI issues, and better localization. The new design in Hera was in response to user feedback from Juno, and enables some nice new features. It now always shows usernames for all users, shows users' backgrounds as cards so you can more easily find users who maybe haven't set differentiating avatars, notifies when Caps or Num Lock are on, and makes 'Log In as Guest' more distinct when it's enabled. The new Onboarding app that ships with Hera introduces key features to users and handles common first-run tasks like managing privacy settings." Further details and screenshots can be found in the project's release announcement.
elementary OS 5.1 -- Running the Pantheon desktop
(full image size: 1.7MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Tails 4.1
The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) is a Debian-based live DVD/USB with the goal of providing complete Internet anonymity for the user. The project's latest release is Tails 4.1 which switches the default key server, updates the Tor Browser application and Thunderbird mail client, and adds newer hardware support. "Use keys.openpgp.org as the default OpenPGP key server. keys.openpgp.org is more trustworthy than other OpenPGP public key servers because it only references an OpenPGP public key after sending a confirmation email to the email addresses listed in the key. keys.openpgp.org does not distribute third-party signatures, which are the signatures on a key that were made by some other key. Third-party signatures are the signatures used to create the OpenPGP Web of Trust. keys.openpgp.org prevents OpenPGP certificate flooding attacks, which can make your OpenPGP keyring unusable and crash your computer. Update Tor Browser to 9.0.2. Update Thunderbird to from 60.9.0 to 68.2.2. Replace the TorBirdy extension with custom settings and patches in Thunderbird that provide equivalent privacy. Update Enigmail to 2.1.3, which has a simplified setup wizard that automatically creates an OpenPGP key for new email accounts." The project's release announcement offers further details.
Univention Corporate Server 4.4-3
Univention Corporate Server (UCS) is an enterprise-class distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. The project's latest release is an update to the distribution's 4.4 series: 4.4-3. "With this release, we have found a solution to three challenges: first, we fixed problems with upgrading Docker which occurred in older UCS installations. These had led us to delay the update to UCS 4.4-2 for some environments and to extend the maintenance of UCS 4.4-1 in order to give all users sufficient time to perform updates. Less common, but all the trickier were two other cases. With some Samba 4 shares, newer versions of Windows Explorer could crash when accessing the security settings. This was caused by extended file system permissions in connection with local user accounts not stored in LDAP. From this Samba generated status codes unknown to Windows. The second and similarly difficult to pinpoint case in an Open Source software used by us was a startup problem of OpenLDAP, which only occurred with a very rare constellation of contents at the end of the database file. We were able to isolate both problems, solve them in UCS and make patches available to the OSS projects." Additional information can be found in the distribution's release announcement.
Proxmox 6.1 "Virtual Environment"
Proxmox is a commercial company which offers specialized products based on Debian. The company has launched Proxmox Virtual Environment version 6.1 which is based on Debian 10.2 "Buster". The release announcement covers the highlights of the new version: "It is built on Debian Buster 10.2 and a specially modified Linux kernel 5.3, QEMU 4.1.1, LXC 3.2, ZFS 0.8.2, Ceph 14.2.4.1 (Nautilus), Corosync 3.0, and more of the current leading open-source virtualization technologies. This release brings new configuration options available in the GUI which make working with Proxmox VE even more comfortable and secure. Editing the cluster-wide bandwidth limit for traffic types such as migration, backup-restore, clone, etc. is possible via the GUI. If the optional package ifupdown2 of the Debian network interface manager is installed, it's now possible to change the network configuration and reload it in the Proxmox web interface without a reboot. We have improvements to 2-factor authentication with TOTP and U2F. The HA stack has been improved and comes with a new 'migrate' shutdown policy, migrating running services to another node on shutdown. In the storage backend, all features offered by newer kernels with Ceph and KRBD are supported with version 6.1." Further details can be found in the release announcement.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 1,727
- Total data uploaded: 29.1TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Project Trident migrating from FreeBSD/TrueOS to Void
At the start of this week's issue we talked about Project Trident migrating from its TrueOS base to using Void, a Linux distribution, as its foundation. It is a big shift, one which the developers hope will provide better hardware support, among other benefits. What do you think of the move? Is Trident better off sticking with its TrueOS rolling release or migrating to Void?
You can see the results of our previous poll on favourite shell short-cuts in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Project Trident migrating from FreeBSD/TrueOS to Void
| I think moving to Void is a good idea: | 278 (27%) |
| I think they should stick with TrueOS: | 224 (21%) |
| I think they should migrate to a different platform: | 50 (5%) |
| It is too soon to tell: | 351 (34%) |
| Other: | 140 (13%) |
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| Website News (by Jesse Smith) |
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 16 December 2019. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Article Search page. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (podcast)
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| Archives |
| • Issue 1022 (2023-06-05): GetFreeOS 2023.05.01, Slint 15.0-3, Liya N4Si, cleaning up crowded directories, Ubuntu plans Snap-based variant, Red Hat dropping LireOffice RPM packages |
| • Issue 1021 (2023-05-29): rlxos GNU/Linux, colours in command line output, an overview of Void's unique features, how to use awk, Microsoft publishes a Linux distro |
| • Issue 1020 (2023-05-22): UBports 20.04, finding another machine's IP address, finding distros with a specific kernel, Debian prepares for Bookworm |
| • Issue 1019 (2023-05-15): Rhino Linux (Beta), checking which applications reply on a package, NethServer reborn, System76 improving application responsiveness |
| • Issue 1018 (2023-05-08): Fedora 38, finding relevant manual pages, merging audio files, Fedora plans new immutable edition, Mint works to fix Secure Boot issues |
| • Issue 1017 (2023-05-01): Xubuntu 23.04, Debian elects Project Leaders and updates media, systemd to speed up restarts, Guix System offering ground-up source builds, where package managers install files |
| • Issue 1016 (2023-04-24): Qubes OS 4.1.2, tracking bandwidth usage, Solus resuming development, FreeBSD publishes status report, KaOS offers preview of Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1015 (2023-04-17): Manjaro Linux 22.0, Trisquel GNU/Linux 11.0, Arch Linux powering PINE64 tablets, Ubuntu offering live patching on HWE kernels, gaining compression on ex4 |
| • Issue 1014 (2023-04-10): Quick looks at carbonOS, LibreELEC, and Kodi, Mint polishes themes, Fedora rolls out more encryption plans, elementary OS improves sideloading experience |
| • Issue 1013 (2023-04-03): Alpine Linux 3.17.2, printing manual pages, Ubuntu Cinnamon becomes official flavour, Endeavour OS plans for new installer, HardenedBSD plans for outage |
| • Issue 1012 (2023-03-27): siduction 22.1.1, protecting privacy from proprietary applications, GNOME team shares new features, Canonical updates Ubuntu 20.04, politics and the Linux kernel |
| • Issue 1011 (2023-03-20): Serpent OS, Security Onion 2.3, Gentoo Live, replacing the scp utility, openSUSE sees surge in downloads, Debian runs elction with one candidate |
| • Issue 1010 (2023-03-13): blendOS 2023.01.26, keeping track of which files a package installs, improved network widget coming to elementary OS, Vanilla OS changes its base distro |
| • Issue 1009 (2023-03-06): Nemo Mobile and the PinePhone, matching the performance of one distro on another, Linux Mint adds performance boosts and security, custom Ubuntu and Debian builds through Cubic |
| • Issue 1008 (2023-02-27): elementary OS 7.0, the benefits of boot environments, Purism offers lapdock for Librem 5, Ubuntu community flavours directed to drop Flatpak support for Snap |
| • Issue 1007 (2023-02-20): helloSystem 0.8.0, underrated distributions, Solus team working to repair their website, SUSE testing Micro edition, Canonical publishes real-time edition of Ubuntu 22.04 |
| • Issue 1006 (2023-02-13): Playing music with UBports on a PinePhone, quick command line and shell scripting questions, Fedora expands third-party software support, Vanilla OS adds Nix package support |
| • Issue 1005 (2023-02-06): NuTyX 22.12.0 running CDE, user identification numbers, Pop!_OS shares COSMIC progress, Mint makes keyboard and mouse options more accessible |
| • Issue 1004 (2023-01-30): OpenMandriva ROME, checking the health of a disk, Debian adopting OpenSnitch, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1003 (2023-01-23): risiOS 37, mixing package types, Fedora seeks installer feedback, Sparky offers easier persistence with USB writer |
| • Issue 1002 (2023-01-16): Vanilla OS 22.10, Nobara Project 37, verifying torrent downloads, Haiku improvements, HAMMER2 being ports to NetBSD |
| • Issue 1001 (2023-01-09): Arch Linux, Ubuntu tests new system installer, porting KDE software to OpenBSD, verifying files copied properly |
| • Issue 1000 (2023-01-02): Our favourite projects of all time, Fedora trying out unified kernel images and trying to speed up shutdowns, Slackware tests new kernel, detecting what is taking up disk space |
| • Issue 999 (2022-12-19): Favourite distributions of 2022, Fedora plans Budgie spin, UBports releasing security patches for 16.04, Haiku working on new ports |
| • Issue 998 (2022-12-12): OpenBSD 7.2, Asahi Linux enages video hardware acceleration on Apple ARM computers, Manjaro drops proprietary codecs from Mesa package |
| • Issue 997 (2022-12-05): CachyOS 221023 and AgarimOS, working with filenames which contain special characters, elementary OS team fixes delta updates, new features coming to Xfce |
| • Issue 996 (2022-11-28): Void 20221001, remotely shutting down a machine, complex aliases, Fedora tests new web-based installer, Refox OS running on real hardware |
| • Issue 995 (2022-11-21): Fedora 37, swap files vs swap partitions, Unity running on Arch, UBports seeks testers, Murena adds support for more devices |
| • Issue 994 (2022-11-14): Redcore Linux 2201, changing the terminal font size, Fedora plans Phosh spin, openSUSE publishes on-line manual pages, disabling Snap auto-updates |
| • Issue 993 (2022-11-07): Static Linux, working with just a kernel, Mint streamlines Flatpak management, updates coming to elementary OS |
| • Issue 992 (2022-10-31): Lubuntu 22.10, setting permissions on home directories, Linux may drop i486, Fedora delays next version for OpenSSL bug |
| • Issue 991 (2022-10-24): XeroLinux 2022.09, learning who ran sudo, exploring firewall tools, Rolling Rhino Remix gets a fresh start, Fedora plans to revamp live media |
| • Issue 990 (2022-10-17): ravynOS 0.4.0, Lion Linux 3.0, accessing low numbered network ports, Pop!_OS makes progress on COSMIC, Murena launches new phone |
| • Issue 989 (2022-10-10): Ubuntu Unity, kernel bug causes issues with Intel cards, Canonical offers free Ubuntu Pro subscriptions, customizing the command line prompt |
| • Issue 988 (2022-10-03): SpiralLinux 11.220628, finding distros for older equipment and other purposes, SUSE begins releasing ALP prototypes, Debian votes on non-free firmware in installer |
| • Issue 987 (2022-09-26): openSUSE's MicroOS, converting people to using Linux, pfSense updates base system and PHP, Python 2 dropped from Arch |
| • Issue 986 (2022-09-19): Porteus 5.0, remotely wiping a hard drive, a new software centre for Ubuntu, Proxmox offers offline updates |
| • Issue 985 (2022-09-12): Garuda Linux, using root versus sudo, UBports on the Fairphone 4, Slackware reverses change to grep |
| • Issue 984 (2022-09-05): deepin 23 Preview, watching for changing to directories, Mint team tests Steam Deck, Devuan posts fix for repository key expiry |
| • Issue 983 (2022-08-29): Qubes OS 4.1.1, Alchg Linux, immutable operating systems, Debian considers stance on non-free firmware, Arch-based projects suffer boot issue |
| • Issue 982 (2022-08-22): Peropesis 1.6.2, KaOS strips out Python 2 and PulseAudio, deepin becomes independent, getting security update notifications |
| • Issue 981 (2022-08-15): Linux Lite 6.0, defining desktop environments and window managers, Mint releases upgrade tool, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 980 (2022-08-08): Linux Mint 21, Pledge on Linux, SparkyLinux updates classic desktop packages, Peppermint OS experiments with Devuan base |
| • Issue 979 (2022-08-01): KaOS 2022.06 and KDE Plasma 5.25, terminating processes after a set time, GNOME plans Secure Boot check |
| • Issue 978 (2022-07-25): EndeavourOS 22.6, Slax explores a return to Slackware, Ubuntu certified with Dell's XPS 13, Linux running on Apple's M2 |
| • Issue 977 (2022-07-18): EasyOS 4.2, transferring desktop themes between distros, Tails publishes list of updates, Zevenet automates Let's Encrypt renewals |
| • Issue 976 (2022-07-11): NixOS 22.05, making a fake webcam, exploring the Linux scheduler, Debian publishes updated media |
| • Issue 975 (2022-07-04): Murena One running /e/OS, where are all the openSUSE distributions, Fedora to offer unfiltered Flathub access |
| • Issue 974 (2022-06-27): AlmaLinux 9.0, the changing data of DistroWatch's database, UBports on the Pixel 3a, Tails and GhostBSD publish hot fixes |
| • Issue 973 (2022-06-20): openSUSE 15.4, collecting distro media, FreeBSD status report, Ubuntu Core with optional real-time kernel |
| • Issue 972 (2022-06-13): Rolling Rhino Remix, SambaBox 4.1, SUSE team considers future of SUSE and openSUSE Leap, Tails improves Tor Connection Assistant |
| • Issue 971 (2022-06-06): ChimeraOS 2022.01.03, Lilidog 22.04, NixOS gains graphical installer, Mint replaces Bluetooth stack and adopts Timeshift, how to change a MAC address |
| • Issue 970 (2022-05-30): Tails 5.0, taking apart a Linux distro, Ubuntu users seeing processes terminated, Budgie team plans future of their desktop |
| • Full list of all issues |
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