OpenMandriva Lx3 Forked, ZFS on Debian, H264 in Fedora
The next OpenMandriva is one step closer to becoming a release this week as the cooker developmental branch was forked off to stabilize Lx3. Petter Reinholdtsen today announced that ZFS has been accepted into Debian "after many years of hard work" and Christian Schaller blogged H264 support is now available to Fedora users. In other news, LibreOffice 5.1.3 was released and Jack Germain reviewed Simplicity Linux.
OpenMandriva's Kate Lebedeff yesterday announced that the cooker repo was to be forked and cloned today to begin stabilizing Lx3 for release. The Lx3 Alpha was released April 2015 and the Beta arrived a year later in April 2016. After a bit of discussion on the OpenMandriva developers' mailing list and some package fixing it was decided to fork the GitHub repo. There is no release schedule or road map publicly available so one assumes they 'release when ready.' However with today's fork, a release candidate can be expected hopefully in the coming weeks. It's been a long time coming, but it shouldn't be as long as it has been. The release status tops May 18 technical committee meeting agenda, so it feels like it's getting closer. Also teased is a discussion on a "pseudo-rolling-release model."
Debian's Petter Reinholdtsen today announced that ZFS for Linux has "finally entered Debian" unstable as of May 11. It's been updated twice already and Reinholdtsen said the source "is available via git on Alioth" if anyone wants to help. ZFS is said to be the next generation file system originally developed by Sun Microsystems and passed to Oracle. It's released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) that some believe prohibits its inclusion in Linux.
Fedora's Christian Schaller today said that an OpenH264 plugin to provide H264 multimedia support is now available to Fedora users. More work is needed to bring it up to snuff, but developer Wim Taymans, of GStreamer fame, is working with Cisco to make it more complete and useful to users. Schaller added the team is looking into more ways to "bring even more codecs to Fedora Workstation" and expect more announcements on codec support this year.
In other news:
* SELinux vs Systemd: What's Safer for Linux Servers?
* Simplicity Linux Digs Deeper Than Its Puppy Linux Pals
* LibreOffice 5.1.3 available for download, Best Word Processor for Linux