Mark Wilson writes: The new Microsoft has place an increased importance on the cloud, and with other companies following suit, reliance on server solutions has increased. Today the company announces that it is bringing SQL Server to Linux. Both cloud and on-premises versions will be available, and the news has been welcomed by the likes of Red Hat and Canonical. Although the Linux port of SQL Server is not due to make an appearance until the middle of next year, a private preview version is being available to testers starting today. While the full launch of SQL Server for Linux is not due until the middle of 2017, SQL Server 2016 is expected to launch later this year.

An anonymous reader writes: After almost a year of development, bug fixing and cleanup, BorgBackup 1.0.0 has been released. BorgBackup is a fork of the Attic-Backup project — a deduplicating, compressing, encrypting and authenticating backup program for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and other unixoid operating systems (Windows may also work using CygWin, but that is rather experimental/unsupported). It works on 32bit as well as on 64bit platforms, x86/x64 and ARM CPUs (maybe as well on others, but these are the tested ones). For Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X, there are single-file binaries which can be just copied onto a system and contain everything needed (Python, libraries, BorgBackup itself). Of course, it can be also installed from source. BorgBackup is FOSS (BSD License) and implemented in Python 3 (91%), speed critical parts are in C or Cython (9%).

An anonymous reader writes: There was much hope that Fedora 24 would be the first major Linux distribution using Wayland by default in place of an X.Org Server, that didn't pan out with Fedora 24 Workstation developers deciding not to use Wayland by default but it will remain a log-in time option. Fedora Wayland has made a lot of progress but functionality like on-screen keyboard, accessibility, remote displays, USB display hot-plugging, and other functionality is incomplete for the Fedora 24 timeline. At least there are many other Fedora 24 features that made it for this next release due out in June. Wayland will turn eight years old this year.

Freshly Exhumed writes: A series of posts on the Project Sputnik developers' forum at Dell indicate that hardware on a soon to be released XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop will support Thunderbolt 3 USB Type C, which has been tested on the device with video and USB 3.1 on non-dock devices, although Dell's Type C docks are not yet supported. Intel has already implemented Thunderbolt 3 drivers in the Linux kernel, so this Dell initiative represents a first for a physical implementation on a consumer platform.

paroneayea writes: GNU Guix, the functional package manager (and with GuixSD, distribution) got a nice feature yesterday: timely delivery of security updates with grafts. Guix's new grafts feature recursively produces re-linked packages as dependencies without waiting for all to compile when a time-sensitive security upgrade is an issue. This came just in time for this week's OpenSSL security issues, and has been successfully tested by the community. It worked so well that it was able to reproduce the ABI break issue that other traditional distributions experienced also!

Community manager Rikki Endsley writes: The open source label was created back in 1998, not long after I got my start in tech publishing. Fast forward to late 2014, when I was thinking about how much open source technologies, communities, and business models have changed since 1998. I realized that there was no easy way (like a yearbook) to thumb through tech history to get a feel for open source. Sure, you can flip through the virtual pages of a Google search and read the "Best of" lists collected by a variety of technical publications and writers, much like you can thumb through newspapers from the 1980s to see how big we wore our shoulder pads, neon clothing, and hair back then. But neither research method is particularly efficient, nor do they provide snapshots that show diversity within communities and moments of time. The idea behind the Open Source Yearbook is to collaborate with open source communities to collect a diverse range of stories from the year. We let the writers pick the criteria, which means the yearbook isn't just full of the fastest, most popular, smartest, or best looking open source solutions. Instead, the yearbook offers a mix of open source solutions and projects, from a range of writers and communities, to offer a well-rounded (albeit incomplete) glimpse at what open source communities and projects looked like in 2015. The yearbook is now available for a free download.

New submitter KGIII writes: "After a recent Steam change, there were more than 1,900 Steam Linux games listed as Valve ended up including yet-to-be-released Linux game ports. That total including unreleased Linux games is now up to 2,009! But in terms of released Linux game titles available for download right now, the 1,900 threshold was crossed tonight to end out February." It's getting there. All of you gamers might just be able to make the choice to move to Linux soon. It looks like there are quite a few more games coming down the pipe. This is a good thing as it gives gamers more options for their operating system. I imagine this bodes well for the SteamOS project and for the dedicated SteamOS devices.

StewBeans writes: At Evanta's recent CIO Executive Summit in Washington, D.C., two Enterprisers took the stage to discuss how CIOs can influence the future of business at the "tipping point" of technology and innovation today. David Bray, CIO of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, began the talk: "2013 was the year there was the same number of network devices on the face of the planet as there were humans -- seven billion network devices on the face of the planet, seven billion humans. Now 2015, just two years later, we're at 14 billion network devices on the face of the planet." This set the stage for a conversation on the future of technology that touched on everything from Moore's Law to the consumerization of technology, global connectivity, and mass personalization. Bray and co-presenter Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat, shared their predictions and insights into how all businesses will need to evolve and adapt to a future in which they have less control.

SteamOS just gained support for Vulkan, the cross-platform alternative to Microsoft's DirectX 12 and Apple's Metal. This should make it easier for developers to write and optimize games for SteamOS, closing the performance gap with Windows and encouraging more developers to support Linux. This feature arrived in SteamOS Brewmaster version 2.63. Valve added version 355 of the Linux Nvidia driver, which means SteamOS offers Vulkan support when used alongside Nvidia hardware. Intel's graphics hardware should also support Vulkan on SteamOS in the near future. AMD is still working on its new driver, known as AMDGPU, that will replace the current fglrx driver for SteamOS and other Linux-based platforms. If you use Linux distribution besides SteamOS, you can download Nvidia's Vulkan-ready Linux driver or an experimental version of Intel's Vulkan-enabled graphics driver.

mikejuk writes: Details of the next in the family of the successful Raspberry Pi family have become available as part of FCC testing documents. The Pi 3 finally includes WiFi and Bluetooth/LE. Comparing the board with the Pi 2 it is clear that most of the electronics has stayed the same. A Raspberry Pi with built in WiFi and Bluetooth puts it directly in competition with the new Linux based Arduinos, Intel's Edison and its derivatives, and with the ESP8266 — a very low cost (about $2) but not well known WiFi board. And of course, it will be in competition with its own stablemates. If the Pi 3 is only a few dollars more than the Pi 2 then it will be the obvious first choice. This would effectively make the Pi Zero, at $5 with no networking, king of the low end and the Pi 3 the choice at the other end of the spectrum. Let's hope they make more than one or two before the launch because the $5 Pi Zero is still out of stock most places three months after being announced and it is annoying a lot of potential users.

prisoninmate writes: On Monday, February 22, 2016, Softpedia reported on the availability of new kernel updates for several of Canonical's supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu 15.10, for which five kernel vulnerabilities have been patched at that point in time. And from the looks of it, the respective kernel updates introduced a regression, which Canonical patched four days later, on February 26, 2016, saying that the issue was introduced along with the fixed vulnerabilities for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) and it broke graphics displays for those running the OS in VMWare VMs.

WheatGrass writes to note that the company T-Platforms has introduced the first mass production unit based upon the Russian Baikal-T1 processor, mentioned here last in 2014. The new Baikal-based workstation is called the "Meadowsweet terminal," according to T-Platform's official website; the feature list says it's running a Debian-based Linux distro. "Congratulations, Russia," Says WheatGrass. (According to Google's translation of this Russian-language story at RG.RU Digital, "[Y]ou can install many conventional applications, such as the LibreOffice office suite, Firefox web browser, and so on, the developers say," but the main use seems to be as a thin client.)

LichtSpektren writes: Phoronix reports that Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler at the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFS) have posted a blog post today arguing that Canonical's plan to distribute Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" with support for the ZFS file system violates the Linux kernel's GPLv2 license.

On February 18, Dustin Kirkland at Canonical wrote on his blog: "We at Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the industry's leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS. And in doing so, we have concluded that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with their terms of both of those licenses...The CDDL cannot apply to the Linux kernel because zfs.ko is a self-contained file system module — the kernel itself is quite obviously not a derivative work of this new file system. And zfs.ko, as a self-contained file system module, is clearly not a derivative work of the Linux kernel but rather quite obviously a derivative work of OpenZFS and OpenSolaris. Equivalent exceptions have existed for many years, for various other stand alone, self-contained, non-GPL kernel modules. Our conclusion is good for Ubuntu users, good for Linux, and good for all of free and open source software."

The SFS's blog post of today states: "We are sympathetic to Canonical's frustration in this desire to easily support more features for their users. However, as set out below, we have concluded that their distribution of zfs.ko violates the GPL."

An anonymous reader writes: On February 20th, a hacker working under the handle 'Peace' took control of the website of Linux Mint, a popular Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu (and Debian) targeted toward non-technical users and power users unhappy with modern desktop environments. While these attacks are regrettable, and part of an infrastructure problem rather than a problem with the distribution itself, it increasingly appears that the Linux Mint team is spread too thin when it comes to security. The distribution itself blacklists updates that work perfectly in Ubuntu and Debian, and the graphical utilities don't update the kernel. Because the value added by Linux Mint is in Cinnamon, why do the developers need to distribute a broken version of Ubuntu when the Cinnamon DE could be distributed as an Ubuntu spin?

An anonymous reader writes: The milestone release FFmpeg 3.0 "Einstein" has been unleashed. For those who need a reminder, FFmpeg comprises several libraries and command-line tools (the main command-line tool being "ffmpeg") that encode, decode, transcode, and stream audio/visual data, etc. FFmpeg supports a multitude of codecs, filters, and container formats too numerous to mention here. FFmpeg is used by MPlayer, VLC, HandBrake, Chrome, and many other projects. Changes from 2.x to 3.0 include: a much better native AAC encoder, better hardware acceleration, and some API/ABI breakage. See this, this, this, this, and the changelog for much better descriptions of the improvements.

New submitter mmoorebz writes: The Linux Foundation is announcing new areas of focus for its Open Mainframe Project. The Open Mainframe Project is a collaborative effort launched six months ago as a focal point for the deployment and use of the Linux OS on the mainframe.

jones_supa writes: Vijay Pandurangan from Twitter warns about a Linux kernel bug that causes containers using Virtual Ethernet devices for network routing to not check TCP checksums. Examples of software stacks that use Virtual Ethernet devices are Docker on IPv6, Kubernetes, Google Container Engine and Mesos. The kernel flaw results in applications incorrectly receiving corrupt data in a number of situations, such as with bad networking hardware. The bug dates back at least 3 years or more – it is present in kernels as far back as the Twitter engineering team has tested. Their patch has been reviewed and accepted into the kernel, and is currently being backported to -stable releases back to 3.14 in various distributions. If you use containers in your setup, Pandurangan recommends that you deploy a kernel with this patch.

An anonymous reader writes: The Linux Mint website was hacked last night and was pointing to malicious ISOs that contained an IRC bot known as TSUNAMI, used as part of an IRC DDoSing botnet. While the Linux Mint team says they were hacked via their WordPress site, security experts have discovered that their phpBB forum database was put up for sale on the Dark Web at around the same time of the hack. Also, it seems that after the Linux Mint team cleaned their website, the hackers reinfected it, which caused the developers to take it down altogether.

prisoninmate writes: As some of you may know, Linux 4.3 was not an LTS (Long Term Support) release, so the last maintenance build is now Linux kernel 4.3.6, as announced earlier by Greg Kroah-Hartman, a renowned kernel developer and maintainer. While he's telling users of the Linux 4.3 series to update to the 4.3.6 point release, he also urges them, especially OS vendors, to move to the most advanced stable series, in this case, Linux kernel 4.4 LTS, which just received its second point release the other day. However, it appears that Linux kernel 4.3.6 is quite an update, as it changes a total of 197 files, with 2310 insertions and 963 deletions, bringing some much-needed improvements.

prisoninmate writes: Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) builds are available for download in the form of Live and Installable ISO images for Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, on both 64-bit and 32-bit platforms, and that existing Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS users can now update their systems. But not only Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) users can update, as all the official flavors have been updated as well, so users of Kubuntu 14.04 LTS, Edubuntu 14.04 LTS, Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, Lubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu Studio 14.04 LTS, Mythbuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu Kylin 14.04 LTS can also update their systems today or grab the new ISOs.