NOAA Breaks Weather Apps, Slackware Updates, Valve @ 20
The LinuxCon headlines continue to dominate but, more importantly, our desktop weather apps are broken thanks to NOAA decommissioning the site. Liam Dawe looked back at 20 years of Valve and Sebastian "sebas" Kügler introduced new KDE kscreen-doctor. Slackware rolled out some updates including a rare kernel upgrade and The VAR Guy wants to hear about your first time.
Disaster struck Linuxville today. Many of our beloved weather applications and applets were rendered useless due to a change at NOAA Weather Service. OMG!Ubuntu! wrote of this very thing today but I wasn't going to discuss it until it struck me too! OMG!Ubuntu! reported that GNOME Weather broke because weather.noaa.gov now shoots "This Service is no longer available" error. Commandline weather-utils uses the same URL and issued "weather error: failed to retrieve HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found." Visiting that URL nets three links with one offering up alternative addresses and other relevant information. So for the weather app, open the stations file and change the address for your city zone to http://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/decoded/XXXX.TXT, where XXXX is your city zone code.
The Slackware project issued several security updates yesterday for versions 14.2 and current. libgcrypt, GnuPG, Glib2, Screen, Stunnel, and several kernel packages were updated. The main vulnerability patched in new Linux 4.4.1.9 was that man-in-the-middle-like attack getting so much press lately. The GnuPG and libgcrypt updates also addressed security advisories while the others were to fix application bugs.
www.gamingonlinux.com today observed that Valve, the guys behind Steam and SteamOS, is 20 years old today. Valve used to pump out some fairly popular games, ever hear of Half-Life? Dawe recounted the Linux Steam story starting in 2003 when Steam was first released. Of course, it was Windows only at the time but years later it became available for Linux and Mac. SteamOS is based on Linux and power the Steam Machine.
In other news:
* multisceen in plasma: improved tools and debugging
* We Want to Hear About Your First Time with Linux