bobthesungeek76036 writes: COVID-19 has another victim: RedHat has cancelled this year's Summit event in San Francisco and it will now be a virtual event. "We are taking this precautionary measure after closely monitoring developments with coronavirus (COVID-19) and guidance from the CDC, WHO, and other health authorities," reads a statement on Red Hat's website. "We know you have questions, and we will continue to share answers as they become available. Stay tuned to the Red Hat blog for additional information."

The free, multi-day, virtual event will take place April 28-29, 2020. Attendees who were registered for Red Hat Summit will automatically be registered for Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience at no charge. Those who registered will also have the option to either roll over their pass to Red Hat Summit 2021 or receive a refund.

Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews: The Raspberry Pi line has provided great little Linux computers to nerds -- its low price and small size makes it ideal for tinkering and doing projects. But also, the device has proven to be a solid media device, wonderful for watching videos and emulating classic video games. In other words, it has been a very versatile computer, serving as many things to many people. With the release of the Raspberry Pi 4, however, it finally became powerful enough to serve as a true desktop computer. By installing a Linux distribution, some people can use it for day-to-day computer use, such as web browsing, playing media, and word processing. Unfortunately, the $35 base model came with a paltry 1GB of RAM. Today, this changes, as the company has dropped the price of the 2GB version to $35, effectively doubling the memory for the base model.

January 19, 2038 is for Linux what Y2K was for mainframe and PC computers in 2000, reports ZDNet. It's the day that the value for time "runs out of numbers" and, in the case of 32-bit Unix-based operating systems like Linux and older versions of macOS, "starts counting time with negative numbers..."

"But the fixes are underway to make sure all goes well when that fatal time rolls around." nickwinlund77 shared their report: Linux developers have seen this coming for decades. So, Linux kernel developer Arnd Bergmann and others have been working on a repair. These corrections are now in the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel. Bergmann explained, "Linux-5.6, or my backport of the patches to 5.4, should be the first release that can serve as a base for a 32-bit system designed to run beyond year 2038."

There are some caveats:

- All user space must be compiled with a 64-bit time_t, which will be supported in the coming musl-1.2 and glibc-2.32 releases, along with installed kernel headers from Linux-5.6 or higher.

- Applications that use the system call interfaces directly need to be ported to use the time64 syscalls added in Linux-5.1 in place of the existing system calls.

- Applications that use a private copy of kernel uapi header files or their contents may need to update to the Linux-5.6 version.

- A few remaining interfaces cannot be changed to pass a 64-bit time_t in a compatible way, so they must be configured to use CLOCK_MONOTONIC times...

After we fix this, we won't have to worry about 64-bit Linux running out of seconds until 15:30:08 GMT Sunday, December 4, 29,227,702,659. Personally, I'm not going to worry about that one.

The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) has publicly said it has nothing to do with a misleading poster designed to put fear into the hearts of parents and urge them to call the police if their children are using Kali Linux. From a report: The poster, made public by Twitter user @G_IW, has reportedly been distributed by local authorities on behalf of the West Midlands Regional Organised Crime Unit (WMROCU). It appears the creators of the poster are aiming to inform parents of what dubious software to look out for if they suspect their children are up to no good on the computer. While a good and reasonable intention, the disinformation on the poster, as described by @G_IW, is "staggering." Virtual machines, the Tor Browser, Kali Linux, WiFi Pineapple, Discord, and Metasploit are all deemed terrible finds and the poster urges parents to call the cops "so we can give advice and engage them into positive diversions."

jrepin writes: The KDE community today announced the release of Plasma 5.18. This version of the popular desktop environment is the latest long-term supported release and brings an emoji selector, user feedback capabilities, a global edit mode, and improvements to System Settings, the Discover software manager, widgets, GTK integration and much more. The full Plasma 5.18.0 changelog is available here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: In May 2019, South Korea's Interior Ministry announced plans to look into switching to the Linux desktop from Windows. It must have liked what it saw. According to the Korean news site Newsis, the South Korean Ministry of Strategy and Planning has announced the government is exploring moving most of its approximately 3.3 million Windows computers to Linux. The reason for this is simple. It's to reduce software licensing costs and the government's reliance on Windows. As Choi Jang-hyuk, the head of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, said, "We will resolve our dependency on a single company while reducing the budget by introducing an open-source operating system."

How much? South Korean officials said it would cost 780 billion won (about $655 million) to move government PCs from Windows 7 to Windows 10. [...] Windows will still have a role to play for now on South Korean government computers. As the Aju Business Daily, a South Korean business news site, explained: Government officials currently use two physical, air-gapped PCs. One is external for internet use, and the other is internal for intranet tasks. Only the external one will use a Linux-based distro. Eventually, by 2026, most civil servants will use a single Windows-powered laptop. On that system, Windows will continue to be used for internal work, while Linux will be used as a virtual desktop via a Linux-powered cloud server. This looks to eventually end up as a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) model. The report notes that the Ministry of National Defense and National Police Agency are already using the Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS-based Harmonica OS 3.0.

"Meanwhile, the Korean Postal Service division is moving to TMaxOS," reports ZDNet. "The Debian Linux-based South Korean Gooroom Cloud OS is also being used by Defense and the Ministry of Public Administration and Security."

An anonymous reader quotes TechRadar: Intel's Clear Linux distribution looks like it could be the best operating system to run on cheap AMD hardware, with benchmarks showing it outperforms Windows 10 and Ubuntu on a $199 laptop with a budget AMD Ryzen 3200U processor. The Phoronix website ran a series of benchmarks on a super-cheap AMD laptop from Walmart, and found that Intel Clear Linux beat popular Linux distros Fedora and Ubuntu for 78% of the tests.

Not only is it remarkable that a relatively unknown Linux distro is so easily outperforming established operating systems, the fact that Intel is the company behind the distro is particularly ironic. As you can imagine, Clear Linux is optimized for Intel processors, but it seems like it works brilliantly on AMD hardware as well.

In 2017 Elementary OS built a pay-what-you-want app store -- funded with $10,000 raised on IndieGogo. Now they're trying to raise another $10,000 for a one-week, in-person sprint in Denver, Colorado, Forbes reports, to upgrade the store while bringing an even grander concept to reality: That concept comprises 4 main goals:

- Enable open source developers to monetize their apps on every other Linux distribution

- Empower developers to ship apps with cutting-edge technologies

- Improve privacy, security, and stability

- Streamline the payments process

On the technical side of things, the team plans to rebuild AppCenter's backend from the ground up to enable newer technologies developers are asking for, and they're rallying behind the Flatpak packaging format to get it done. They've already been collaborating with the FlatHub team, and plan to bring in developers from Endless and GNOME to ensure that "our solution can be reused and improved by other Flatpak stores and the greater open source desktop ecosystem."
For a donation of $10, "you'll have your name immortalized in the AppCenter code on GitHub," explains a promotional video. (There's already 70 backers who have claimed this perk.) In fact, "Less than 8 hours ago we launched #AppCenterForEveryone, and we're 50% funded," announced an update Friday on Twitter. The campaign's web page shared this note of appreciation.

"With your support, we'll be able to accelerate the timeline on adopting cutting edge technology and making an even more competitive Open Source operating system and a compelling foundation for all Flatpak stores."

Phoronix's Michael Larabel is doing some performance testing on Walmart's $199 Motile-branded M141 laptop (which has an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor, Vega 3 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 14-inch 1080p display).

But first he compared the performance of its pre-installed Windows 10 OS against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.

Some highlights: - Java text rendering performance did come out much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 with this Ryzen 3 3200U laptop...

- The GraphicsMagick imaging program tended to run much better on Linux, which we've seen on other systems in the past as well.

- Intel's Embree path-tracer was running faster on Ubuntu...

- Various video benchmarks were generally favoring Ubuntu for better performance though I wouldn't recommend much in the way of video encoding from such a low-end device...

- The GIMP image editing software was running much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 in its development state than GIMP 2.10 on Windows 10...

- Python 3 performance is still much faster on Linux than Windows.

- If planning to do any web/LAMP development from the budget laptop and testing PHP scripts locally, Ubuntu's PHP7 performance continues running much stronger than Windows 10. - Git also continues running much faster on Linux.
Their conclusion? "Out of 63 tests ran on both operating systems, Ubuntu 20.04 was the fastest... coming in front 60% of the time." (This sounds like 38 wins for Ubuntu versus 25 wins for Windows 10.)

"If taking the geometric mean of all 63 tests, the Motile $199 laptop with Ryzen 3 3200U was 15% faster on Ubuntu Linux over Windows 10."

This week a remotely-exploitable vulnerability (granting root privileges) was discovered in OpenSMTPD (OpenBSD's implementation of server-side SMTP).

ZDNet notes that the library's "portable" version "has also been incorporated into other OSes, such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and some Linux distros, such as Debian, Fedora, Alpine Linux, and more." To exploit this issue, an attacker must craft and send malformed SMTP messages to a vulnerable server... OpenSMTPD developers have confirmed the vulnerability and released a patch earlier Wednesday -- OpenSMTPD version 6.6.2p1...

The good news is that the bug was introduced in the OpenSMTPD code in May 2018 and that many distros may still use older library versions, not affected by this issue. For example, only in-dev Debian releases are affected by this issue, but not Debian stable branches, which ship with older OpenSMTPD versions.

Technical details and proof of concept exploit code are available in the Qualys CVE-2020-7247 security advisory.
Hackaday has a more detailed description of the vulnerability, while the Register looks at the buggy C code.

Interestingly, Qualys researchers exploited this vulnerability using a technique from the Morris Worm of 1988.

Tech pundit Robert X. Cringely has been sharing technology predictions every January for over two decades -- and he made another big one on Friday: IBM has three divisions — Global Technology Services (GTS), Global Business Services (GBS), and Red Hat. GTS is the legacy IT business, GBS is the professional services business invented by Lou Gerstner to save IBM the last time it was in huge trouble, and Red Hat is Linux. GTS — that part of IBM most of us still think of as IBM — will probably be sold by summer. Either it will go to private equity (depends on the total debt load) or it will be sold to HPE or maybe to Oracle. Either way, it's not a likely success story, but [current CEO Ginni] Rometty has no real choice. IBM is, at this point, smoke, mirrors, and buybacks. The GTS windfall will land in Ginni's final quarter, juicing her payout, which might be the major point of the deal...

IBM's new CEO is Arvind Krishna, formerly head of the Cognitive Computing unit — IBM's cloud guy. Except Cognitive Computing was never really cloud. Cognitive has been a mishmash of cloud, supported by revenue streams that are anything but cloud. It's cloud in name only and will be the part that goes next summer, possibly with Mr. Krishna still at its head.

The next chairman of IBM after Rometty will be current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. If Whitehurst is as smart as I think he is, he started yesterday looking for a new job. It's not that he really intends to leave, but as the next savior of IBM, Ginni et al will pay anything to keep him. Cut your new deal now, Jim, while demand is greatest....Whitehurst will turn IBM into Red Hat, which will take HQ to North Carolina and mean most of the remaining GBS staff will be gone in a year...

It still won't save IBM. They'll go down in the coming year or two along with the rest of the industry we used to call IT...

Let's just say that IBM's loss is AWS's gain.

"The WireGuard VPN protocol will be included into the next Linux kernel as Linus Torvalds has merged it into his source tree for version 5.6," reports TechRadar:
While there are many popular VPN protocols such as OpenVPN, WireGuard has made a name for itself by being easy to configure and deploy as SSH... The WireGuard protocol is a project from security researcher and kernel developer Jason Donenfeld who created it as an alternative to both IPsec and OpenVPN. Since the protocol consists of around just 4,000 lines of code as opposed to the 100,000 lines of code that make up OpenVPN, it is much easier for security experts to review and audit for vulnerabilities.

While WireGuard was initially released for the Linux kernel, the protocol is now cross-platform and can be deployed on Windows, macOS, BSD, iOS and Android.
Ars Technica notes that with Linus having merged WireGuard into the source tree, "the likelihood that it will disappear between now and 5.6's final release (expected sometime in May or early June) is vanishingly small." WireGuard's Jason Donenfeld is also contributing AVX crypto optimizations to the kernel outside the WireGuard project itself. Specifically, Donenfeld has optimized the Poly1305 cipher to take advantage of instruction sets present in modern CPUs. Poly1305 is used for WireGuard's own message authentication but can be used outside the project as well — for example, chacha20-poly1305 is one of the highest-performing SSH ciphers, particularly on CPUs without AES-NI hardware acceleration.

Other interesting features new to the 5.6 kernel will include USB4 support, multipath TCP, AMD and Intel power management improvements, and more.

An anonymous reader writes: IBM named Arvind Krishna as chief executive officer, replacing longtime CEO Virginia Rometty. Krishna, 57, is currently the head of IBM's cloud and cognitive software unit and was a principal architect of the company's purchase of Red Hat, which was completed last year. Rometty, 62, will continue as executive chairman and serve through the end of the year, when she will retire after almost 40 years with the company, IBM said in a statement Thursday. The shares rose about 5% in extended trading.

Since becoming IBM's first female CEO in 2012, Rometty had bet the company's future on the market for hybrid cloud, which allows businesses to store data on both private and public cloud networks run by rivals such as AmazonWebServices and Microsoft Corp.'s Azure. By then Big Blue, once the world leader in technology, had lagged behind competitors for years after largely missing the initial cloud revolution under her predecessor, Sam Palmisano. The announcement comes as a "welcome and overdue leadership change," said Wedbush Securities analyst Moshe Katri. "At least that's how we're looking at it -- and obviously the market seems to agree." "Krishna, her successor, was the mastermind behind the Red Hat deal. He proposed the acquisition to Rometty and the board, suggesting hybrid cloud is the company's best bet for future growth," adds Bloomberg. "He has led the development of many of IBM's newer technologies like artificial intelligence, cloud and quantum computing."

"Prior to IBM adopting its hybrid multi-cloud strategy, the company had a walled-garden approach to cloud computing, largely focusing on its own services. Krishna spearheaded IBM's shift toward hybrid, prompting the company to work with rival providers rather than compete against them."

Slashdot reader celest adds: In case there were still any doubts that IBM is turning into Red Hat, not the other way around, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has just been named President of IBM. (Full disclosure: I'm the open-source strategy guy at IBM Canada).
While he was CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

jrepin writes: Linus Torvalds has announced Linux 5.5 release, codenamed as Kleptomaniac Octopus.The latest version of the open source operating system kernel brings RAID1 with 3- and 4- copies to btrfs filesystem, ext4 gets direct I/O via iomap together with fscrypt supporting smaller block sizes, and you can now use SMB as root filesystem. AMD OverDrive overclocking is now supported on Navi GPUS, wake-on-voice on newer Google Chromebooks is now supported. Added was a Logitech keyboard driver. KUnit is a new unit testing framework for the kernel. There are many more new features which you can read about on Kernel Newbies changelog page. For downloads visit The Linux Kernel Archives.

Long-time Slashdot reader Motor writes: Rocket League — a very popular multiplayer game — will no longer "be patched" for Linux and the Mac after March — say the publisher, Psyonix...

The publishers say it's motivated by the need to support unspecified "new technologies".

Thanks Psyonix.
The announcement says their final patch "will disable online functionality (such as in-game purchases) for players on macOS and Linux, but offline features including Local Matches, and splitscreen play will still be accessible."

"Players on Mac can try running Rocket League on Windows with Apple's Boot Camp tool," explains a support page, while adding in the next sentence that "Boot Camp is not something Psyonix officially supports." And if you play Rocket League on Linux, "you can try Steam's Proton app or Wine. These tools are not officially supported by Psyonix."

The support page also includes instructions on how to request a refund.

Slashdot reader PrimeGoat has used Linux for 20 years, "10 of which were during my career as a Linux sysadmin..."

"However, there's more to being a sysadmin than just knowing how to use Linux." There are best practices that evolve, new methods of doing things and new software that constantly comes out and evolves. This is where my challenge comes. In 2012 I stopped my career as a Linux sysadmin... There's a lot of stuff that I missed out on. I'm wondering what I should do to refresh my skills and to catch up on what I've missed?

An obvious solution would be to get a job as a sysadmin again, but this probably isn't going to happen, as I'm changing my trajectory. I'm currently training to become a fullstack web developer, but still have a need to update my sysadmin skills and keep them fresh... Any suggestions on what actions to take on my own to catch up and keep fresh?
Leave your thoughts in the comments. What's the best way to refresh both your Linux and sysadmin skills?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Wine 5.0 has been released today and contains over 7,400 bug fixes and numerous audio and graphics improvements that will increase performance in gaming on Linux. With the release of Wine 5.0, WineHQ hopes to resolve many of these issues, with the main improvements being:

-Builtin modules in PE format: To make games think Wine is a real Windows environment, most Wine 5.0 modules have been converted into the PE format rather than ELF binaries. It is hoped that this will allow copy-protection and anti-cheat programs to not flag games running under Wine as being modified.
-Multi-monitor support: Multiple displays adapters and multi-monitor configurations are now supported under Wine.
-XAudio2 reimplementation: XAudio2 libraries have been added back to Wine and will use the FAudio library for better compatibility.
-Vulkan 1.1 support: "The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.1.126 of the Vulkan spec." Here are the release notes, download locations for the binary packages (when available) and source.

You can buy an official Kubuntu laptop. Called "Focus". It is an absolutely powerhouse with top specs. From a report: Here's the specs list:
CPU: Core i7-9750H 6c/12t 4.5GHz Turbo
GPU: 6GB GTX-2060
RAM: 32GB Dual Channel DDR4 2666 RAM
Storage: 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe
Display: 16.1" matte 1080p IPS
Keyboard: LED backlit, 3-4mm travel
User expandable SDD, NVMe, and RAM
Superior cooling
The starting price for the Kubuntu Focus Laptop is $2395.

Ars Technica recently ran a rebuttal by author, podcaster, coder, and "mercenary sysadmin" Jim Salter to some comments Linus Torvalds made last week about ZFS.

While it's reasonable for Torvalds to oppose integrating the CDDL-licensed ZFS into the kernel, Salter argues, he believes Torvalds' characterization of the filesystem was "inaccurate and damaging."
Torvalds dips into his own impressions of ZFS itself, both as a project and a filesystem. This is where things go badly off the rails, as Torvalds states, "Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel... [the] benchmarks I've seen do not make ZFS look all that great. And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it any more..."

This jaw-dropping statement makes me wonder whether Torvalds has ever actually used or seriously investigated ZFS. Keep in mind, he's not merely making this statement about ZFS now, he's making it about ZFS for the last 15 years -- and is relegating everything from atomic snapshots to rapid replication to on-disk compression to per-block checksumming to automatic data repair and more to the status of "just buzzwords."

[The 2,300-word article goes on to describe ZFS features like per-block checksumming, automatic data repair, rapid replication and atomic snapshots -- as well as "performance wins" including its Adaptive Replacement caching algorithm and its inline compression (which allows datasets to be live-compressed with algorithms.]

The TL;DR here is that it's not really accurate to make blanket statements about ZFS performance, absent a very particular, well-understood workload to measure that performance on. But more importantly, quibbling about the fastest possible benchmark rather loses the main point of ZFS. This filesystem is meant to provide an eminently scalable filesystem that's extremely resistant to data loss; those are points Torvalds notably never so much as touches on....

Meanwhile, OpenZFS is actively consumed, developed, and in some cases commercially supported by organizations ranging from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (where OpenZFS is the underpinning of some of the world's largest supercomputers) through Datto, Delphix, Joyent, ixSystems, Proxmox, Canonical, and more...

It's possible to not have a personal need for ZFS. But to write it off as "more of a buzzword than anything else" seems to expose massive ignorance on the subject... Torvalds' status within the Linux community grants his words an impact that can be entirely out of proportion to Torvalds' own knowledge of a given topic -- and this was clearly one of those topics.

Monday Red Hat and IBM jointly filed their own amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the "Google vs. Oracle" case, arguing that APIs cannot be copyrighted.

"That simple, yet powerful principle has been a cornerstone of technological and economic growth for over sixty years. When published (as has been common industry practice for over three decades) or lawfully reverse engineered, they have spurred innovation through competition, increased productivity and economic efficiency, and connected the world in a way that has benefited commercial enterprises and consumers alike."

An anonymous reader quotes Red Hat's announcement of the brief: "The Federal Circuit's unduly narrow construction of 17 U.S.C. 102(b) is harmful to progress, competition, and innovation in the field of software development," Red Hat stated in the brief. "IBM and Red Hat urge the Court to reverse the decision below on the basis that 17 U.S.C. 102(b) excludes software interfaces from copyright protection...."

The lower court incorrectly extended copyright protection to software interfaces. If left uncorrected, the lower court rulings could harm software compatibility and interoperability and have a chilling effect on the innovation represented by the open source community... Red Hat's significant involvement with Java development over the last 20 years has included extensive contributions to OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java platform, and the development of Red Hat Middleware, a suite of Java-based middleware solutions to build, integrate, automate and deploy enterprise applications. As an open source leader, Red Hat has a stake in the consistent and correct determination of the scope of copyright protection that applies to interfaces of computer programs, including the Java platform interface at stake in this case.

Open source software development relies on the availability of and unencumbered access to software interfaces, including products that are compatible with or interoperate with other computer products, platforms, and services...