Debian 7 & 8 Updated, New SUSE CTO, Different Distros
The Debian project announced updates to "jessie" and "wheezy" last weekend bringing security and bug fixes only. In other news, SUSE announced a new executive position and the gentlemen who filled it. Elsewhere, Christine Hall discussed five distributions that "break the mold" and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reported on Linus Torvalds' talk at the 2016 Embedded Linux Conference.
Debians 7.10 and 8.4 were announced April 2 bringing security and major bug fixes to users. As usual, Debian advised users to upgrade through package management, but provided media for new installs. All the security updates announced since the last releases are included as well as new kernels for both and new NVIDIA drivers for 7.10. systemd was updated in 8.4 as was glic, gtk+2.0, and suckless tools. GNOME Gmail is gone from both and Nautilus Pastebin was removed from 8.4. The installer and APT was updated in each as well. All told, 75 packages were updated and nearly 60 security advisories were applied to make Debian 8.4. Debian 7.10 received over 35 package updates in addition to the over 100 security fixes.
SUSE, company behind openSUSE, today announced a new executive position: Chief Technology Officer. Filling the position is Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo, who brings CTO and Open Source experience with him to SUSE. Di Giacomo's role is to continue to expand SUSE's portfolio and footprint around the world. "As SUSE CTO, Di Giacomo's vision is a software-defined and cloud-based, IT-powered future for the enterprise." In related news, Suse expands distributor network in Mideast.
Christine Hall today said that folks often comment that many Linux distributions are "cookie cutter" systems - meaning they are so similar as to be almost indistinguishable. So, Hall compiled a short list of distributions that are very much out of the ordinary. She began with stali, a distro that uses statically linked libraries, passes on systemd, and lives by the suck-less philosophy. Hall followed with NixOS, Kali, and Tiny Core.
In other news:
* Torvalds on the Internet of Things
* Pisi Linux 1.2 Xfce don't love me none
* PCLinuxOS with UEFI Boot: An excellent release
* FreeBSD 10.3 lands with better Linux compatibility, UEFI enhancements