Issue #226 / Sep 2019

IBM finally closed the deal to purchase Red Hat this month, writing a $34 billion check for the leading Linux company in hopes of restarting its cloud and network service endeavors. Red Hat was a really big fish in the open source scene, but they are tiny compared to IBM, and many observers are wondering how this story will unfold.

MX Linux 18 and Manjaro Gnome 18.0

Debian Buster Arrives; IBM Acquires Red Hat; Raspberry Pi 4 Is Here; Ubuntu Takes a U-Turn with 32-Bit Support: OpenSSH Fixes Side Channel Attacks; Firefox Fixes Error that Crashed HTTPS Pages; and Altair Releases HyperWorks 2019

Adding git Documentation; Untangling the System Call Situation; and Bit or Bitmap?

Beyond the realm of mainstream, enterprise-ready desktop giants lie a handful of miniscule Linux distributions that barely leave a noticeable footprint on a computer's resources. Here's a look at some of the leading small distros.

The nftables firewall utility offers a simpler and more consistent approach for managing firewalls in Linux.

Developers cannot avoid unit testing if they want their Go code to run reliably. Mike Schilli shows how to test even without an Internet or database connection, by mocking and injecting dependencies.

Timeshift lets users easily create, manage, and restore system snapshots.

Use QPDF to easily make structural changes to your PDFs, including reorganizing pages, creating watermarks, setting encryption options, and changing permissions.

Depending on your needs, LibreOffice Writer offers varying degrees of security for PDFs.