PCLOS Rebuttal, Live Long and Game, TDF@4
The big story today in Linux news was the release of the long awaited Vulkan graphics API. The news was carried by just about everyone. Elsewhere, blogger DarkDuck said PCLinuxOS is "the walking dead" and a critical vulnerability in glibc has experts warning to upgrade immediately. SUSE announced SUSECon today and Charles-H. Schulz blogged about the "unusual" LibreOffice 5.1 release on this The Document Foundation's fourth birthday.
Khronos Group today announced the Vulkan 1.0 graphics API specification saying it is meant to compliment OpenGL and not replace it. Vulkan is cross-platform, gives games direct control of the graphic chip, and saves main processor cycles. It also takes advantage of today's multi-core processors. NVIDIA's Neil Trevett said, "Vulkan's multi-threading and explicit resource management can enable a new class of smooth, high-performance engines and applications." NVIDIA and Intel have provided drivers for their chips with Vulkan support already but, ironically, we're still waiting for AMD's Linux version. Game developers are already hopping on-board.
Coincidently, the day after Matt Hartley's love letter to PCLOS, blogger DarkDuck wasn't as impressed. He didn't give it the run-through Hartley did, in fact, he lost interest after having network connectivity issues. DarkDuck sells CDs and DVDs of Linux distributions and was a bit surprised when an order came in for PCLinuxOS KDE because the last ISO was released in 2014. As Hartley said, there's a DVD worth of updates after the install, but DarkDuck wonders why an updated install image hasn't been released. He said it'd be better for their users and his customers. He added that the PCLOS website is also outdated saying, "They are stuck somewhere in 2007, I suspect." Duck sent out the CD to the customer but he asked, "Why bother with this zombie?"
Linux expert and writer Katherine Noyes today said, "Stop what you're doing and apply this patch." Researchers discovered a new bug in long stable code that can allow "attacker-controlled domain names, attacker-controlled DNS servers or man-in-the-middle attacks." Red Hat and Google verified the vulnerability in glibc 2.9 onward and Red Hat's Carlos O'Donell released a patch for it today. It should be trickling down to distributions in the coming days. InfoWorld's Fahmida Y. Rashid has more details as to the nature and uses of the vulnerability.
In other news:
* LibreOffice 5.1- an unusual release
* The Document Foundation at 4
* Brute force beats premature optimization