Linux Release Overshadowed by Linus Rant
Linux Torvalds announced the release of Linux 4.3 yesterday with some new and improved features. Eclipsing the new kernel release was another salty post by the famous Linux founder beginning, "Christ people. This is just s**t." In other news, a couple more Ubuntu reviews were posted and Adam Williamson has an important Fedora 23 public service announcement.
Linux 4.3 was released yesterday, November 1, with drivers for the latest Intel processors and improvements to the Intel graphic stack. Other goodies include new Nouveau drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards, initial support for AMD R9 Fury cards, and even some frame-buffer device updates. EXT3 support is deprecated in favor of EXT4 code, and most other filesystems saw improvements. Torvalds said in his note that most of the changes were "dominated by the network stuff," but overall this cycle was "calm."
But, of course, another message from Torvalds is receiving much more attention. In response to some code submitted by Hannes Frederic Sowa through David Miller, Torvalds became annoyed and said so. "The conflict I get is due to stupid new gcc header file crap. But what makes me upset is that the crap is for completely bogus reasons." He further said that the code in question was neither "legible, efficient, [nor] particularly safe." He said it generates idiotic code that looks bad with no reason except to make use of a "shiny new nonstandard function that we have never ever needed anywhere else, and that is just compiler-masturbation." With no ambiguity he concluded, "Get rid of it. And I don't *ever* want to see that s**t again." Miller responded quickly saying, "No problem, I'll revert it all."
Neil Rickert said Saturday that openSUSE 42.1 had gone Gold and after testing it a bit he said, "Expect this to turn out to be a pretty good release." He added a few notes on it and then, in a separate post, offered some advice in preparing for the release November 4.
Fedora 23 has gone Gold too and package became available in repos for updaters since Saturday. The release announcement is due Tuesday November 3 but Jamie Watson already tested it and posted screenshots and a walkthrough of his "favorite Linux installer." However, folks that make use of Red Hat sponsored FreeIPA should "NOT upgrade" their servers to Fedora 23 just yet. "Do NOT upgrade it to Fedora 23 yet! There are several bugs in the upgrade process and you will wind up with a broken server which requires some tricky manual fixing," he said.
The Apache OpenOffice project released Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2 last Wednesday with "stability fixes, bug fixes and enhancements." All users are urged to upgrade. Major changes include:
* Bug fixes in Writer, Calc, Impress/Draw, Base.
* Better WebDAV and file locking support: OpenOffice is now able to properly interact with Microsoft Sharepoint. These enhancements were funded, and contributed upstream, by the Emilia-Romagna regional administration (Italy), where OpenOffice was adopted a few years ago.
* Redesign of the PDF export dialog for better usability on small laptop screens.
* Updates of underlying libraries, for better performance and increased security.
* Security vulnerability fixes, with details eventually disclosed at the security announcements page.
In other news:
* Ubuntu 15.10 vs Kubuntu 15.10 vs Ubuntu GNOME 15.10
* The good, the bad and the Ubuntu 15.10
* Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf review - Fast and spurious
* Twitch crowd-controlled Arch installation hijacked by Gentoo botnet, wrecked by fiber cut