LinuxSnap for Monday 7/29/13
Linux News Headlines
Linux 3.11-rc3 Released
The third release candidate for Linux 3.11 was made available on Sunday.
From the release announcement:
Another week, another -rc.
And please just forget about me telling you people to get back to work
last week. You got. -rc3 has about 50% more commits than -rc2 did.
Part of it is that a few people missed rc2, but part of it is that
people just sent me more. Please stop. It’s summer. It’s nice outside.
Take the kids to the pool or something. Send me just regression fixes.Otherwise I’ll have to start shouting at people again.
Anyway, remember how I asked people to test the backlight changes in
rc2 because things like that have really bad track records? Yup. That
all got reverted. It fixed things for some people, but regressed for
others, and we don’t do that “one step forward, two steps back” thing.
But never fear, we have top people looking at it.The crc t10 dif crypto supprt got reverted too, since there were
initrd infrastructure problems with it.But the bulk here is some block driver updates (drbd, rsxx, xen,
bcache, libata), and the drm changes (mostly qxl, but there’s changes
to the “big tree” too: radeon, intel, nouveau). And various random
other drivers – usb, scsi, pincontrol, etc.
Latest Distro Releases
Sparky Linux 3.0
On Saturday, the Debian-based distro Sparky Linux hit version 3.0. The distro uses LXDE as its default desktop environment.
From the release notes:
SparkyLinux 3.0 “Annagerman” is out.
Sparky 3.x is built on the “testing” branch of Debian GNU/Linux “Jessie”.The final release of Sparky 3.0 features:
– Linux kernel 3.9.8-1
– all packages updating from Debian testing repositories as of 2013/07/21
– minor bugs fixing
– small improvements of all the desktops
– new Sparky3-theme compatible with GNOME 3.8
– added extra functionality of the CLI edition (former name: Core) – see: How to SparkyLinux CLI
Puppy Linux 5.7 “Precise”
Version 5.7 of Puppy Linux (codenamed “Precise”) was released on Sunday. The distro is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (“Precise Pangolin).
From the release announcement:
This is going to take everyone by surprise! I decided that 5.7beta2 is pretty good, so haven’t bothered with an RC. Here is a short announcement:
Another pup in the Precise series! This pup comes in two flavours, one for older hardware and/or those on dialup Internet, the other for those with relatively modern hardware.
The “retro flavour” is an upgrade path for those who have used our Wary Puppy, that targeted older PCs and analog modem dialup — unlike most other Linux distributions, it continues to support a wide range of analog “winmodems”. It also has two web browsers, SeaMonkey and Opera, the latter preferred for PCs with less than 256MB RAM.
The “modern flavour” only has one browser, SeaMonkey, and forgoes most of the analog modem and true-SCSI drivers, and is the choice that will suit most people with a PAE-capable i686 CPU, no ISA cards, and 256MB or more RAM. You also get the benefit of a much smaller download, the live-CD .iso file is 155.7MB.
There are many fixes, improvements and new features in this pup, and the release notes give details. In particular, there are exciting new features at the underlying “Woof-level”, or infrastructure-level, such as the more efficient pup_event daemon and IPC mechanism, and support for running Internet applications as user ‘spot’.
The release notes for Puppy Linux 5.7 can be found here.
Articles of Interest
How Linux is taking over the network – techrepublic.com
Google Chromecast HDMI Streaming Media Player
Today in Linux History
(Sunday) – Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1 Released (2003)
On July 28th, 2003, the first version of Mozilla Thunderbird was released. Today, Thunderbird is the default email client in many Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.
From the version 0.1 release announcement:
Mozilla Thunderbird is a redesign of the Mozilla mail component. Our goal is to produce a cross-platform, stand alone mail application using the XUL user interface. More information about the Mozilla Thunderbird project is available here. We leverage much of the functionality already developed for the Mozilla Seamonkey mail component.
This is our first milestone release. We recognize that we have a lot more to do. At the same time, we are extremely excited about the progress of Mozilla Thunderbird and want to share it with the community. This current milestone is based on a running snapshot of the Mozilla 1.5b trunk.
Notes
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