FSF's 30th, GNOME's 18th, Kali 2.0, and Fedora 23a
The Free Software Foundation today announced their 30th birthday party to take place in Boston, Massachusetts in October. Also celebrating is GNOME, who turns 18 this Saturday, August 15. Elsewhere, Kali Linux 2.0 was announced, but one early review says it's not ready. Fedora 23 Alpha arrived yesterday as well bringing "wide changes" and Italo Vignoli looks at the numbers from LibreOffice 5.0 a week after its announcement.
FSF today announced its upcoming birthday party scheduled for October 2, 2015 7:00 P.M. to October 3 11:00 P.M. at CIC Boston, 50 Milk St, Boston, MA. For those who can't attend the official party in Boston, a worldwide party network has been established to help organize one in your area. Those that can make it will be treated to dinner, social interaction, a mini- User Freedom Summit, and (the highpoint of the celebration) a speech from Richard Stallman. A donation is requested but not mandatory at registration.
GNOME is celebrating their 18th birthday this month August 15. Their party is a bit less organized. The foundation suggests posting on social media about why you love GNOME, direct others to the release video, or use the "I am GNOME" badge as your profile picture. Hashtags #HappyBirthdayGnome #IAMGNOME #GNOME2015. Other suggestions include thanking your local contributor and wearing your GNOME gear around the neighborhood or posting selfies.
Three distributions were making headlines today and yesterday: Kali Linux 2.0, Bodhi Linux 3.1.0, and Fedora 23 Alpha. Kali 2 was released yesterday dubbed "Our next generation penetration testing platform." The big news this release is that Kali Linux is now a rolling release distribution, where updates come in continuous incremental packages. Other big news is GNOME 3 is now the default interface, but KDE, Xfce, MATE, lxde, and e17 are natively supported. Downloads are available on Kali's website and distribution upgrades are supported. However, security blog Samiux.blogspot said after sharing a host of issues:
Kali Linux 2.0 is not well tested before it is released. It is very disappointed. Kali 2.0 is slower than 1.1.0a on the same testing machine. Or you may need a more powerful computer or laptop to do with it. Some applications cannot be running properly on the Quick Menu in this release. DISAPPOINTED!
Jeff Hoogland announced the release of Bodhi Linux 3.1.0 yesterday too saying, "This release is a bigger deal for the Bodhi team because this release is the first to use the Moksha Desktop." He said it's stable and he feels comfortable using it in a production environment. Upgraders are not switched to Moksha automatically and will need to follow the directions on the forums.
Fedora 23 Alpha was also released yesterday as planned bringing hardened packages by default and SSL3 and RC4 were deactivated due to known vulnerabilities. Other highlights include LibreOffice 5, Python 3, Unicode 8 support, Perl 5.22, GNOME 3.18, fedup upgrade integration into DNF, and standardized passphrase policies. New Cinnamon version was added to the spins.
LibreOffice 5.0 was released last week and today Italo Vignoli said 35,000 unique IPs visited the blog since the announcement. That's about four times the traffic usually seen. He also said there were over 1000 articles covering all the facets of LibreOffice 5. Donations surged a bit as well pushing the number to over 150,000 since May 2013. Elsewhere, Jono Bacon looked back at the pothole-ladened road to LibreOffice and concluded that LibreOffice was more than a suite of software - it's a community.