NEWS

Debian Buster Arrives

The Debian community has announced the release of Debian 10 "Buster" (https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706). Debian is one of the most popular GNU/Linux-based distributions. Buster will be supported for the next five years.

Buster ships with several desktop environments including Cinnamon 3.8, GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, LXDE 0.99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, and Xfce 4.12. In this release, GNOME will default to using the Wayland display server instead of Xorg. "The Xorg display server is still installed by default and the default display manager allows users to choose Xorg as the display server for their next session," according to a blog post from the Debian project.

The Reproducible Builds project enabled Debian developers to build bit-for-bit identical binary packages of the open-source packages available in Debian 10. "This is an important verification feature, which protects users against malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. Future Debian releases will include tools and metadata so that end-users can validate the provenance of packages within the archive," said the blog post.

To make Debian more secure, AppArmor is installed and enabled by default. Furthermore, all methods provided by the APT package manager (except cdrom, gpgv, and rsh) can optionally make use of seccomp-BPF sandboxing. The HTTPS method for APT is included in the apt package and does not need to be installed separately.

Buster supports a total of ten architectures, including 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit little-endian Motorola/IBM PowerPC (ppc64el), 64-bit IBM S/390 (s390x), ARMel, and more.

Debian 10 is available for free download (https://www.debian.org/distrib/).

IBM Acquires Red Hat

IBM has completed the acquisition of open source company Red Hat for approximately $34 billion (https://www.tfir.io/2019/07/09/ibm-acquires-red-hat-for-34-billion/). Founded in 1993 as a Linux vendor, Red Hat has evolved into an open-source infrastructure player. Red Hat has become synonymous with a successful open source business model that's often called the Red Hat Business Model.

Red Hat has become one of the most successful open source companies, clocking in at around $3.4 billion in annual revenues. The company will become an independent entity within IBM as part of IBM's Cloud and Cognitive Software segment.

Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and its current management team. Whitehurst will report to IBM CEO, Ginni Rometty.

IBM will maintain Red Hat's headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, its facilities, brands, and practices.

Raspberry Pi 4 Is Here

Eben Upton, the founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, announced the next major update to the single-board computer. Raspberry Pi 4 is here (https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-from-35/).

The new model has the same form factor and pricing. Yes! It's still being sold for $35. But it has everything else improved. Pi 4 features a 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU running at 1.5Ghz. Now you can get up to 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM and full-throughput Gigabit Ethernet. It has two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports. You can now connect two monitors running at 4K resolution. It also has 4Kp60 hardware decode of HEVC video. Instead of using the old micro-USB for power, it's now using USB-C.

Raspberry Pi foundation has also released a new Raspbian operating system for this device. "To support Raspberry Pi 4, we are shipping a radically overhauled operating system, based on the forthcoming Debian 10 Buster release. This brings numerous behind-the-scenes technical improvements, along with an extensively modernized user interface, and updated applications including the Chromium 74 web browser."