Issue #247 / Jun 2021

Of all the strange news this month, the one item that really caught my eye was the announcement of IBM's COBOL for Linux 1.1 compiler. I guess most of us are aware that millions of lines of business software around the world are still written in COBOL, and for that reason, old-school COBOL programmers still have work. But think about this for a minute: COBOL has existed for 62 years, the x86 architecture has been around for 43 years, and Linux has been with us for 30 years.

Knoppix 9.1 and Zorin OS 15.3 Core

In the news: Apple M1 Hardware Support To Be Merged into Linux Kernel 5.13; KDE Launches the Qt 5 Patch Collection; Linux Creator Warns Next Kernel Could Be Delayed; System76 Updates Its Pangolin Laptop; New Debian-Based Distribution Arriveson the Market; System76 Releases New Thelio Desktop; and AlmaLinux Is Officially Available.

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on: “Welcoming" a New Kernel Developer; and An Ancient Feature Goes Belly Up. 

The encryption methods we use today are no match for tomorrow's quantum computers. We'll show you why and what's ahead for cryptography in the post-quantum era.

Knoppix, a portable operating system and rescue disk, continues to evolve.

Linux package managers work too slowly. The experimental distri research project investigates ways to speed up package management.

With an increasing number of software installation methods, testing cutting-edge applications may require learning about the installer first.

TLS encryption is wonderful if it is running over a reliable transport protocol like TCP; but if your needs call for the less reliable UDP transport, you'd better start learning about DTLS.

JSON data format is a standard feature of today's Internet – and a common option for mobile and desktop apps – but many users still regard it as something of a mystery. We'll take a close look at JSON format and some of the free tools you can use for reading and manipulating JSON data.