Lubuntu, a popular Ubuntu flavor, has gained traction over the years for supporting older hardware. As Brian Fagioli writes at BetaNews, one of the focuses of the Lubuntu developers is to support aging computers. However, that is about to change. He adds: When Lubunu 18.10 is released in October 2018, it will ditch LXDE for the newer LXQt. Despite it also being a desktop environment that is easy on resources, the Lubuntu developers are planning to drop their focus on old hardware after the transition. "[...] Our main focus is shifting from providing a distribution for old hardware to a functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer. In essence, this is leveraging something we have always done with Lubuntu; providing an operating system which users can use to revive their old computers, but bringing this to the age of modern computing," says Simon Quigley of Lubuntu team.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: The German state of Lower Saxony is set to follow Munich in migrating thousands of official computers away from Linux to Microsoft's Windows. As initially reported by Heise, the state's tax authority has 13,000 workstations running OpenSuse -- which it adopted in 2006 in a well-received migration from Solaris -- that it now wants to migrate to a "current version" of Windows, presumably Windows 10.

The authority reasons that many of its field workers and telephone support services already use Windows, so standardisation makes sense. An upgrade of some kind would in any case be necessary soon, as the PCs are running OpenSuse versions 12.2 and 13.2, neither of which is supported anymore.

According to the Lower Saxony's draft budget, €5.9m is set aside for the migration in the coming year, with a further €7m annually over the following years; it's not yet clear how many years the migration would take... Munich's shift away from LiMux -- the city's own Ubuntu-based distribution -- is expected to cost more than €50m overall, involving the deployment of around 29,000 Windows-based computers.

Slashdot reader fisted quotes NetBSD.org: The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.0, the sixteenth major release of the NetBSD operating system.

This release brings stability improvements, hundreds of bug fixes, and many new features. Some highlights of the NetBSD 8.0 release are:

— USB stack rework, USB3 support added.
— In-kernel audio mixer (audio_system(9)).
— Reproducible builds
— PaX MPROTECT (W^X) memory protection enforced by default
— PaX ASLR enabled by default
— Position independent executables by default
[...]

NetBSD is free. All of the code is under non-restrictive licenses, and may be used without paying royalties to anyone.

Canonical announced on Friday that Microsoft's PowerShell Core is now available on Linux platform as a Snap. From a report: If you aren't familiar, a Snap is essentially a packaged version of a program that can be easily installed on many Linux distributions. Many see it as the future of Linux, as it has the potential to reduce fragmentation. "Built on the .NET Framework, PowerShell is an open source task-based command-line shell and scripting language with the goal of being the ubiquitous language for managing hybrid cloud assets. It is designed specifically for system administrators and power-users to rapidly automate the administration of multiple operating systems and the processes related to the applications that run on those operating systems," says Canonical.

BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: System76 has long been a Linux computer seller, but recently, it has transitioned into a Linux computer maker. What's the difference, you ask? Well, currently, the company doesn't really make its own computers. System76's laptops, for instance, are made by other manufacturers, which it re-brands as its own. No, System76 doesn't just slap its name on other company's laptops and ship them out the door. Actually, it works closely with the manufacturers, tweaks firmware, and verifies that both Ubuntu and its Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS will work well on the hardware. System76 then offers top-notch support too. In other words, the company isn't just selling a computer, but an experience too. Unfortunately, when you rely on other computer manufacturers, you don't fully control the experience. Ultimately, System76 cannot achieve its true vision without building its own laptops. And so, that is exactly what it is going to do! Yes, System76 will be building and selling the computers right here in the USA (Denver, Colorado to be exact). I mean, when your company supports open source ideology and takes pride in being "Made in America," how can you go wrong?

Many folks in the Linux community are excited to see the fruits of System76's labor, and today, we get a small peek. No, the company isn't sharing any of its computer designs, but it is showing off its new manufacturing facility. In a new blog post by System76 customer service all-star Emma, she shares several photos of the new factory. [T]he space is absolutely massive! It seems System76 has very lofty goals. Exactly when these new computers both designed and manufactured by System76 will become available for purchase is anyone's guess. Quite frankly, based on the System76's blog post, it seems they are still at very early stages. With that said, it will be interesting to see what is born inside that factory in Colorado. The Linux community is anxiously awaiting something special.

sombragris writes: Slackware, the oldest GNU/Linux distribution which is still actively maintained, turned 25 this week. The latest stable version, Slackware 14.2, was released two years ago, but the development version (-current) is updated on a fast pace. Today the development version offers kernel 4.14.55, gcc 8.1.1, glibc 2.27. mesa 18.1.4, xorg 1.20, and the Xfce and KDE desktop environments as default, with many more available as third-party packages. Other points of note are that Slackware is systemd-free, opting instead for a simple BSD-style init.

Since its first release ever, this has been a distro with a strong following due to its hallmarks of simplicity, speed, ease of maintenance and configuration. Happy birthday Slackware!

MrBrklyn (Slashdot reader #4,775) writes: Artix Linux, the young systemd free OS based on arch, is reaching a critical point in it's development and calling for new packagers.
Here's more from the ongoing thread on the project's forum: You don't have to be an expert in the occult arts for that; an elementary grasp of Linux in general and how PKGBUILD works should be enough for basic contributions. Help and training will be provided, free of charge!

An anonymous reader shares a report: After several big feature pull requests of new "i915" Intel DRM driver features landing in DRM-Next for Linux 4.19, the Intel open-source developers have sent in what they believe to be their last batch of feature changes for queuing this next kernel cycle. Feature activity has dwindled compared to the earlier pull requests, but this latest gathering of patches does include Intel GVT vGPU huge-page support for guests, continued Panel Self Refresh (PSR) fixes/clean-ups, GMBUS improvements for HDCP v2.2 compliance, GEM memory management improvements, and other display code improvements.

The team behind Gentoo Linux has revealed the reasons for the recent hack of its GitHub organization account. The short version: shoddy security. From a report: It seems that the hackers were able to gain access to the GitHub organization account by using the password of one of the organization administrators. By the team's own admission, poor security meant that the password was easy to guess. As the Register points out, "only luck limited the damage," but the Gentoo Linux team is keen to let it be known that it has learned a lot from the incident. In an entry on the Gentoo Linux wiki, there is a fairly detailed breakdown of what happened, how it happened, and what is being done to prevent it from happening again. The wiki entry summarizes the hack attack as follows: "An unknown entity gained control of an admin account for the Gentoo GitHub Organization and removed all access to the organization (and its repositories) from Gentoo developers. They then proceeded to make various changes to content. Gentoo Developers & Infrastructure escalated to GitHub support and the Gentoo Organization was frozen by GitHub staff. Gentoo has regained control of the Gentoo GitHub Organization and has reverted the bad commits and defaced content."

Archangel Michael writes: Reuters is reporting that Britain's Micro Focus has agreed to sell its SUSE open-source enterprise software business to Swedish buyout group EQT Partners for $2.535 billion, lifting its shares 6 percent. Micro Focus, a serial acquirer that has been struggling to get to grips with a $8.8 billion Hewlett Packard Enterprise deal, said on Monday it would use some of the proceeds to reduce debt and could return some of the rest to shareholders. SUSE is used by banks, universities and government agencies around the world and is a pioneer in enterprise-grade Linux software serving companies such as Air India, Daimler and Total.

Linux Mint, the maker of popular Linux distro, announced on Friday the general availability of a new version of their operating system. Called Linux Mint 19 "Tara", the new version offers a range of new features, improvements, and a promise that it would stick around for a while. Writing for BetaNews, Brian Fagioli: The most significant aspect of Linux Mint 19 is the new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS base. Tara will receive updates until 2023 -- very impressive. The kernel is at 4.15, and all three desktop environments are being updated too. Mate is now at version 1.2, Cinnamon gets bumped up to 3.8, and Xfce is updated to 4.12.

In Linux Mint 19, the star of the show is Timeshift, said, Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint Project Leader. Although it was introduced in Linux Mint 18.3 and backported to all Linux Mint releases, it is now at the center of Linux Mint's update strategy and communication, he added. Thanks to Timeshift you can go back in time and restore your computer to the last functional system snapshot. If anything breaks, you can go back to the previous snapshot and it's as if the problem never happened.

Exploit broker Zerodium is offering rewards of up to $500,000 for zero-days in UNIX-based operating systems like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, but also for Linux distros such as Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, and Tails. From a report: The offer, first advertised via Twitter earlier this week, is available as part of the company's latest zero-day acquisition drive. Zerodium is known for buying zero-days and selling them to government agencies and law enforcement. The company runs a regular zero-day acquisition program through its website, but it often holds special drives with more substantial rewards when it needs zero-days of a specific category. The US-based company held a previous drive with increased rewards for Linux zero-days in February, with rewards going as high as $45,000. In another zero-day acquisition drive announced on Twitter this week, the company said it was looking again for Linux zero-days, but also for exploits targeting BSD systems. This time around, rewards can go up to $500,000, for the right exploit.

Longtime Slashdot reader Chutzpah shares a report from Gentoo Linux, a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system: June 28 at approximately 20:20 UTC unknown individuals have gained control of the Github Gentoo organization, and modified the content of repositories as well as pages there. We are still working to determine the exact extent and to regain control of the organization and its repositories. All Gentoo code hosted on GitHub should for the moment be considered compromised.

This does NOT affect any code hosted on the Gentoo infrastructure. Since the master Gentoo ebuild repository is hosted on our own infrastructure and since Github is only a mirror for it, you are fine as long as you are using rsync or webrsync from gentoo.org. Update 6/29/18: Gentoo has regained control of the Gentoo GitHub Organization and is working on a procedure for resolution. You can view the update status here.

Beeftopia writes: From ZDNet: "The latest TOP500 Supercomputer list is out. What's not surprising is that Linux runs on every last one of the world's fastest supercomputers. Linux has dominated supercomputing for years. But, Linux only took over supercomputing lock, stock, and barrel in November 2017. That was the first time all of the TOP500 machines were running Linux. Before that IBM AIX, a Unix variant, was hanging on for dear life low on the list."

An interesting architectural note: "GPUs, not CPUs, now power most of supercomputers' speed."

Chinese tech giant Tencent has joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member. From a report: Tencent is one of a few companies to offer the highest level of support to the Linux Foundation. Other tech companies in this stable include IBM, Microsoft, and Intel, as well as fellow Chinese titan Huawei. As part of the deal, Tencent will take a chair on the Foundation's board of directors. It has also promised to offer "further support and resources" to the Foundation's efforts. So far, this has taken the form of Tencent donating several pieces of its software. Already, it's bequeathed TSeer, its service discovery tool, as well as TARS, which is the company's microservices platform. Valued at nearly $500 billion, Tencent is a behemoth of a company. It holds a massive sway over the Chinese tech market, and is spreading its cash (and influence) overseas with strategic investments in companies like Epic Games and Riot Games.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: When leading Linux company Red Hat announces that -- from here on out -- all new Red Hat-initiated open-source projects that use the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) or GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v2.1 licenses will be expected to supplement the license with GPL version 3 (GPLv3)'s cure commitment language, it's a big deal. Both older open-source licenses are widely used.

When the GPLv3 was released, it came with an express termination approach that offered developers the chance to cure license compliance errors. This termination policy in GPLv3 provided a way for companies to repair licensing errors and mistakes... Other companies -- CA Technologies, Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, SAP, and SUSE -- have taken similar GPL positions... In its new position statement, Red Hat explained that the GPLv2 and LGPL, as written, has led to the belief that automatic license termination and copyright infringement claims can result from a single act of inadvertent non-compliance.
"We hope that others will also join in this endeavor," says Red Hat's senior commercial counsel, Richard Fontana, "to reassure the open source community that good faith efforts to fix noncompliance will be embraced."

ZDNet points out that the move to new licenses "doesn't apply, of course, to Linux itself. Linus Torvalds has made it abundantly clear that Linux has been, will now, and always shall be under the GPLv2."

An anonymous reader writes: Linux 4.18 development is going strong with recent 4.18-rc1 release. This kernel cycle has dropped 107,210 lines of code so far but Linux 4.18 is adding many new features. The kernel is coming in lighter as a result of the LustreFS code being removed and other code cleanups. On the feature front, Phoronix reports, "ew AMDGPU support improvements, mainlining of the V3D DRM driver, initial open-source work on NVIDIA Volta GV100 hardware, merging of the Valve Steam Controller kernel driver, merging of the BPFILTER framework, ARM Spectre mitigation work, Speck file-system encryption support, removal of the Lustre file-system, the exciting restartable sequences system call was merged, the new DM writecache target, and much more."

Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond -- and he's also Slashdot reader #3872. Now he's just won a legal victory in court. "Open Source Security, maker of the grsecurity Linux kernel patches, has been directed to pay Bruce Perens and his legal team almost $260,000 following a failed defamation claim," reports The Register. Slashdot reader Right to Opine writes: The order requires Spengler and his company to pay $259,900.50, with the bill due immediately rather than allowing a wait for the appeal of the case. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's attorneys will represent Perens during OSS/Spengler's appeal of the case.

Perens was sued for comments on his blog and here on Slashdot that suggested that OSS's Grsecurity product could be in violation of the GPL license on the Linux kernel. The court had previously ruled that Perens' statements were not defamatory, because they were statements by a non-attorney regarding an undecided issue in law. It is possible that Spengler is personally liable for any damages his small company can't pay, since he joined the case as an individual in order to preserve a claim of false light (which could not be brought by his company), removing his own corporate protection.

jrepin writes: KDE unveils the final release of Plasma 5.13, the free and open-source desktop environment. Members of the Plasma team have focused on optimizing startup and minimizing memory usage. Plasma Browser Integration is a suite of new features which make Firefox, Chrome and Chromium-based browsers work with your desktop. For example, downloads are now displayed in the Plasma notification popup, and the Media Controls Plasmoid can mute and skip videos and music playing from within the browser. Browser tabs can be opened directly using KRunner via the Alt-Space keyboard shortcut. System Settings design has been improved further. Window manager gained much-improved effects for blur and desktop switching. Wayland work continued, with the return of window rules, and initial support for screencasts and desktop sharing. You can view the changelog here.

To celebrate its 14th birthday, Phoronix.com used a 15-inch MacBook Pro to run system benchmarking tests on the following operating systems:

- Windows 10 Pro

- The latest macOS 10.13 High Sierra

- Windows 10 Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) using Ubuntu 18.04

- Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 4.15 kernel, GCC 7.3.0, and an EXT4 file-system.

- Clear Linux 22780 with the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 8.1.1, and EXT4.

- Fedora Workstation 28 with updates is the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 8.1.1, and EXT4.

- OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 7.3.1, and default file-system configuration of Btrfs root file-system with XFS home partition.

The results? When it came to outright wins and losses, Clear Linux 22780 was the front-runner 59% of the time followed by macOS 10.13.4 finishing first 21% of the time and then Fedora Workstation 28 with winning 10% of the time.

For losses, to little surprise considering the I/O overhead, Windows 10 was in last place 38% of the time followed by Ubuntu 18.04 being surprisingly the slowest Linux distribution 30% of the time on this 2016 MacBook Pro.
The article also reminds readers that "For those looking for a Linux laptop, there are plenty of better options..."