Open-source News

While originally Intel planned to transition their OpenGL driver default to the modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver rather than the longstanding "i965" DRI driver for Mesa 19.3, that was pushed back to Mesa 20.0 for introduction in Q1'2020. In aiming to make that revised milestone a reality, a new option has been added to Mesa 20.0 with the Meson build system for being able to indicate the Intel OpenGL driver preference...

Hiding The Hidden: Kali Linux 2019.4 Unleashed  Security Boulevard

While there has been the Libre RISC-V community-driven effort to create a RISC-V graphics processor that basically amounts to a RISC-V core with vector extensions/improvements and running a Vulkan software implementation (though they are now reportedly eyeing POWER instead of RISC-V), Think Silicon has announced the first actual RISC-V ISA based 3D graphics processor...

Librem 5 backers have begun receiving their Linux phones  Ars Technica

Librem 5 backers have begun receiving their Linux phones  Ars Technica

Linux and the first-time developer's journey  New Electronics

Mozilla Firefox 71 Is Now Available to Download for Linux, Windows, and macOS  Softpedia News

65% Off on Linux Foundation Training & Certification [Cyber Monday Sale]  It's FOSS

FreeBSD 12.1 Runs Refreshingly Well With AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X - Benchmarks Against Windows + Linux  Phoronix

For those of you interested in AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors with TRX40 motherboards for running FreeBSD, the experience in our initial testing has been surprisingly pleasant. In fact, it works out-of-the-box which one could argue is better than the current Linux support that needs the MCE workaround for booting. Here are some benchmarks of FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X compared to Linux and Windows for this new HEDT platform.

Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" Beta Now Available to Download with a Fresh New Look  Softpedia News

New checkra1n beta goes live with Apple TV support; Linux version one step behind the release  PiunikaWeb

NetBSD 9.0 is around the corner and finally presenting 64-bit Arm (AArch64) support as well as other long overdue hardware support like Intel Kabylake graphics...

While there is the KDE Frameworks that offers a wonderful set of complementary extensions/add-ons to the Qt5 tool-kit, for those looking for more Qt5 extensions, The Qt Company has launched "The Qt Marketplace" as a source for both free and paid extensions...

With the Linux 5.4 cycle we saw mainline support beginning to come together for some Qualcomm ARM Linux laptops while with Linux 5.5 another milestone is being achieved. There has been out-of-tree support in the works for getting the various consumer Snapdragon laptops working with Linux while those changes are slowly getting into the mainline kernel...

Linux 5.5 Can Boot The Modem Processor On Snapdragon 835 - Needed For Cell/WiFi On Qualcomm Laptops  Phoronix

With the IOMMU updates for the Linux 5.5 kernel there is a major rework to the AMD IOMMU driver to make use of more common DMA IOMMU code for implementing the DMA API but with an admitted risk of potential new regressions...

AMD IOMMU Driver Reworked For Linux 5.5  Phoronix

With approaching another year closer to the Year 2038 problem, where on 19 January 2038 the number of seconds for the Unix timestamp can no longer be stored in a signed 32-bit integer, Linux 5.5 is bringing more Y2038 preparations...

With Approaching Another Year Closer To Year 2038, Linux 5.5 Brings More Y2038 Fixes  Phoronix