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Microsoft developer, David Fowler revealed ‘ProcDump for Linux’, a Linux version of the ProcDump Sysinternals tool, over the weekend on November 3. ProcDump is a Linux reimagining of the classic ProcDump tool from the Sysinternals suite of tools for Windows. It provides a convenient way for Linux developers to create core dumps of their application based on performance triggers. Requirements for ProcDump The tool currently supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux / CentOS 7, Fedora 26, Mageia 6 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, with other versions being tested. It also supports gdb >= 7.6.1 and zlib (build-time only). Limitations of ProcDump Runs on Linux Kernels version 3.5+ Does not have full feature parity with Windows version of ProcDump, specifically, stay alive functionality, and custom performance counters Installing ProcDump ProcDump can be installed using two methods, first, Package Manager, which is a preferred method. The other one is via.deb package. To know more about ProcDump in detail visit its GitHub page. Microsoft Azure reportedly chooses Xilinx chips over Intel Altera for AI co-processors, says Bloomberg report ‘We are not going to withdraw from the future’ says Microsoft’s Brad Smith on the ongoing JEDI bid, Amazon concurs Microsoft bring an open-source model of Component Firmware Update (CFU) for peripheral developers

Yesterday, Facebook open sourced a suite of Linux kernel components and tools. This suite includes products that can be used for resource control and utilization, workload isolation, load balancing, measuring, monitoring, and much more. Facebook has already started using these products on a massive scale throughout its infrastructure and many other organizations are also adopting them. The following are some of the products that they have open sourced: Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) BPF is a highly-flexible Linux kernel code execution engine. It enables safe and easy modifications of kernel behaviors with custom code by allowing bytecode to run at various hook points. Currently, it is being widely used for networking, tracing and security in a number of Linux kernel subsystems. What can you do with it? You can extend the Linux kernel behavior for a variety of purposes such as load balancing, container networking, kernel tracing, monitoring, and security. You can solve those production issues where user-space solutions alone aren’t enough by executing the user-space code in the kernel. Btrfs Btrfs is a copy-on-write (CoW) filesystem, which means that instead of overwriting in one place, all the updates to metadata or file data are written to a new location on the disk. Btrfs mainly focuses on fault tolerance, repair, and easy administration. It supports features such as snapshots, online defragmentation, pooling, and integrated multiple device support. It is the only filesystem implementation that works with resource isolation. What can you do with it? You can address and manage large storage subsystems by leveraging features like snapshots, load balancing, online defragmentation, pooling, and integrated multiple device support. You can manage, detect, and repair errors with data and metadata checksums, mirroring, and file self-healing. Netconsd (Netconsole daemon) Netconsd is a UDP-based daemon that provides lightweight transport for Linux netconsole messages. It receives and processes log data from the Linux kernel and serves it up as a structured data. Simply put, it is a kernel module that sends all kernel log messages over the network to another computer, without involving user space. What can you do with it? Detect, reorder, or request retransmission of missing messages with the provided metadata. Extract meaningful signal from the data logged by netconsd to rapidly identify and diagnose misbehaving services. Cgroup2 Cgroup2 is a Linux kernel feature that allows you to group and structure workloads and also control the amount of system resources assigned to each group. It consists of controllers for memory, I/O, central processing unit, and more. Using cgroup2, you can isolate workloads, prioritize, and configure the distribution of resources. What can you do with it? You can create isolated groups of processes and then control and measure the distribution of memory, IO, CPU and other resources for each group. You can detect resource shortages using PSI pressure metrics for memory, IO, and CPU with cgroup2. With cgroup2, production engineers will be able to deal with increasing resource pressure more proactively and prevent conflicts between workloads. Along with these products, they have open-sourced Pressure Stall Information (PSI), oomd, and many others. You can find the complete list of these products at Facebook Open Source website and also check out the official announcement. Facebook open sources QNNPACK, a library for optimized mobile deep learning Facebook introduces two new AI-powered video calling devices “built with Privacy + Security in mind” Facebook’s Glow, a machine learning compiler, to be supported by Intel, Qualcomm and others

After releasing Fedora 29 beta last month, the Fedora community announced the stable release of Fedora 29. This is the first release to include Fedora Modularity across all Fedora variants, that is, Workstation, Server, and AtomicHost. Other updates include upgrading to GNOME 3.30, ZRAM for ARM images, and a Vagrant image for Fedora Scientific. Additionally, Node.js is now updated to Node.js 10.x as its default Node.js interpreter, Python 3.6 is updated to Python 3.7, and Ruby on Rails is updated to 5.2. Fedora Modularity Modularity gives you the option to install additional versions of software on independent life cycles. You no longer have to make your whole OS upgrade decisions based on individual package versions. It will allow you to keep your OS up-to-date while keeping the right version of an application, even when the default version in the distribution changes. These are the advantages it comes with: Moving fast and slow Different users have different needs, for instance, while developers want the latest versions possible, system administrators prefer stability for a longer period of time. With Fedora Modularity, as per your use case, you can make some parts to move slowly, and other parts to move faster by choosing between latest release or stability. Automatically rebuild containers Many containers are built manually and are not actively maintained. Also, very often they are not patched with security fixes but are still used by many people. To allow maintaining and building multiple versions, Modularity comes with an environment for packagers. These containers get automatically rebuilt every time the packages get updated. Automating packager workflow Often, Fedora contributors have to maintain their packages in multiple branches. As a result, they have to perform a series of manual steps during the build process. Modularity allows packagers to maintain a single source for multiple outputs and brings an additional automation to the package build process. Fedora Silverblue This release introduces the newly named Fedora Silverblue, formerly known as Fedora Atomic Workstation. It provides atomic upgrades, easy rollbacks, and workflows that are familiar from OSTree-based servers. Additionally, it delivers desktop applications as Flatpaks. This gives better isolations and solves longstanding issues with using yum/dnf for desktop applications. GNOME 3.30 The default desktop environment of Fedora 29 is based on GNOME 3.30. This version of GNOME comes with improved desktop performance and screen sharing. It supports automatic updates for Flatpak, a next-generation technology for building and distributing applications on Linux. Read the full announcement of Fedora 29 release on its official website. Swift is now available on Fedora 28 Fedora 29 beta brings Modularity, GNOME 3.30 support and other changes GNOME 3.30 released with improved Desktop performance, Screen Sharing, and more

In order to prepare for the Linux 4.20 release, there are multiple performance improvements made to the Btrfs file-system. These changes are to be shipped in the next Linux kernel release. Btrfs is a modern ‘copy on write’ filesystem for Linux. It offers a lot of features not readily available in other in-tree Linux file-systems such as fault tolerance, repair, and easy administration.  However, its performance has been degrading for some time (partially because copy-on-write by default damages some workloads). However, with performance improvements for the Linux 4.20 release, there should be multiple speed-ups to Btrfs. Improvements include more files/sec in fsmark, better perf on multi-threaded workloads (filebench, dbench), fewer context switches and overall better memory allocation characteristics (multiple benchmarks). Apart from general performance, there's an improvement for qgroups + balance workload. Performance improvements Btrfs has deprecated the blocking mode of path; only the spinning mode is used. Blocking mode of path is eliminated because it resulted in unnecessary wakeups and updates to the path locks. Improvement for qgroups + balance workload include speedup balancing with qgroups, as well as skip quota accounting on unchanged subtrees. The overall gain is about 30+ % in runtime. A small improvement has been made to rb-tree to avoid pointer chasing. rb-tree with cached first node is now used for several structures. Btrfs now has better error reporting, after processing blockgroups and whole device. It continues trimming block groups after an error is encountered. It also has less interaction with transaction commit that improves latency on slower storage (eg. image files over NFS). Cleanups in Btrfs Unused struct members and variables are removed Function return type cleanups are performed Delayed refs code refactoring is done Protection is provided against deadlock that could be caused by crafted image that tries to allocate from a tree that's locked already These are just a select few updates. Read the full list of changes in a post by David Sterba. Linux 4.19 kernel releases with open arms and AIO-based polling interface; Linus back to managing the Linux kernel. KUnit: A new unit testing framework for Linux Kernel bpftrace, a DTrace like tool for Linux now open source

Earlier this month, the Windows 10 October update had problems with files being deleted off users’ computers. After which Microsoft had to pause the mass rollout of Windows 10 update for October. After the issue was reported, Microsoft took steps, did testing with the Windows Insider community for finding the reasons and fixing this bug. But now there is another bug which can cause you to lose your files. Many people having installed the Windows 10 October update have reported an issue where ZIP operations are not working as intended. Windows fails to notify as to which files should be overwritten. On unzipping files to a folder, if other copies of those files already exist in that folder, Windows 10 usually asks whether those existing copies should be overwritten. This does not happen anymore after the update and Windows just overwrites the files. The user is not even informed that the files are overwritten. Accidental overwrites are highly likely if the user doesn’t get any prompt or information. There can be situations where a modified file, for example, is overwritten with something original from the ZIP file. However, this happens only with the built-in Windows file manager. On using a third party tool to work with compressed files, however, this bug does not happen. Wazhai, a Reddit user sums up the issue nicely: “The issue is that in 1809, overwriting files by extracting from an archive using File Explorer doesn’t result in an overwrite prompt dialogue and also doesn’t replace any files at all; it just fails silently. There are also some reports that it did overwrite items, but did so silently without asking.” There is also another scenario but not widely reported where the file extraction seems to happen, but no files are updated. This bug was discussed on Reddit over the weekend and can be read on a Reddit thread, visit their website. Microsoft pulls Windows 10 October update after it deletes user files Microsoft fixing and testing the Windows 10 October update after file deletion bug Microsoft Your Phone: Mirror your Android phone apps on Windows

“Ubuntu is now the world’s reference platform for AI engineering and analytics.” -Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. Yesterday (on 18th October), Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 18.10 termed as ‘Cosmic Cuttlefish’. This new release is focussed on multi-cloud deployments, AI software development, a new community desktop theme, and richer snap desktop integration. According to Mark, the new release will help accelerate developer productivity and help enterprises operate at a better speed whilst being scalable across multiple clouds and diverse edge appliances. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]Fun Fact : Ubuntu codenames are in incremental alphabetical order. Following the Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver, we now have the Cosmic Cuttlefish. These codenames are comprised of an adjective and an animal, both starting with the same letter.[/box] 5 major features of Ubuntu 18.10 #1 New compression algorithms for faster installation and boot Ubuntu 18.10 uses compression algorithms like LZ4 and ztsd, which support around 10% faster boot as compared to those used in its previous version. The algorithms also facilitate the installation process which takes around 5 minutes in offline mode. #2 Optimised for multi-cloud computing This new version is designed especially keeping in mind cloud based deployments. The Ubuntu Server 18.10 images are available on all major public clouds. For private clouds, the release supports OpenStack Rocky for AI and NFV hardware acceleration. It comes with Ceph Mimic to reduce storage overhead. Including the Kubernetes version 1.12, this new version brings increased security and scalability by automating the provisioning of clusters with transport layer encryption. It is more responsive to dynamic workloads through faster scaling #3 Improved gaming performance The new kernel has been updated to the 4.18 based Linux kernel. In addition to this, the updates in Mesa and X.org significantly improve game performance. Graphics support expands to AMD VegaM in the latest Intel Kabylake-G CPUs, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, B+ and Qualcomm Snapdragon 845. Ubuntu 18.10 introduces the GNOME 3.30 desktop which has recently been released thus contributing to an overall gaming performance boost. #4 Startup time boost and XDG Portals support for Snap applications Canonical is bringing some useful improvements to its Snap packages. Snap applications will  start in lesser time. With XDG portal support, Snap can be installed in a few clicks from the Snapcraft Store website. Major public cloud and server applications like Google Cloud SDK, AWS CLI, and Azure CLI are now available in the new version. The new release allows accessing files on the host system through native desktop controls. #5 New default theme and icons Ubuntu 18.10 uses the Yaru community theme replacing their long-serving Ambiance and Radiance themes. It gives the desktop a fresh new look and feel. Other miscellaneous changes include: DLNA support connects Ubuntu with DLNA supported Smart TVs, tablets and other devices Fingerprint scanner is now supported Ubuntu Software removes dependencies while uninstalling software The default toolchain has moved to gcc 8.2 with glibc 2.28 Ubuntu 18.10 is also updated to openssl 1.1.1 and gnutls 3.6.4 with TLS1.3 support All these upgrades are causing waves in the Linux community. That being said, users are requested to check the release notes for issues that were encountered in this new version. You can head over to the official release page to download the new version of this OS. Alternatively, learn more about these new features at itsfloss.com. KUnit: A new unit testing framework for Linux Kernel Google Project Zero discovers a cache invalidation bug in Linux memory management, Ubuntu and Debian remain vulnerable The kernel community attempting to make Linux more secure

On Tuesday, Google engineer Brendan Higgins announced an experimental set of 31 patches by introducing KUnit as a new Linux kernel unit testing framework to help preserve and improve the quality of the kernel's code. KUnit is a lightweight unit testing and mocking framework designed for the Linux kernel. Unit tests necessarily have finer granularity, they are able to test all code paths easily solving the classic problem of difficulty in exercising error handling code. KUnit is heavily inspired by JUnit, Python's unittest.mock, and Googletest/Googlemock for C++. KUnit provides facilities for defining unit test cases, grouping related test cases into test suites, providing common infrastructure for running tests, mocking, spying, and much more. Brenden writes, "It does not require installing the kernel on a test machine or in a VM and does not require tests to be written in userspace running on a host kernel. Additionally, KUnit is fast: From invocation to completion KUnit can run several dozen tests in under a second. Currently, the entire KUnit test suite for KUnit runs in under a second from the initial invocation (build time excluded)." When asked if KUnit will replace the other testing frameworks for the Linux Kernel, Brenden denied it,  saying, “Most existing tests for the Linux kernel are end-to-end tests, which have their place. A well tested system has lots of unit tests, a reasonable number of integration tests, and some end-to-end tests. KUnit is just trying to address the unit test space which is currently not being addressed.” To know more about KUnit in detail, read Brendan Higgins’ email threads. What role does Linux play in securing Android devices? bpftrace, a DTrace like tool for Linux now open source Linux drops Code of Conflict and adopts new Code of Conduct

Microsoft started re-releasing the Windows October update last week. The update was halted earlier due to a bug that was deleting user files and folders. After data deletion was reported by multiple users, Microsoft pulled the Windows 10 October update. Microsoft investigated all of the data loss reports and fixed all known issues in the update. It also conducted internal validation and is providing free customer service for affected users. Microsoft is currently rolling out the update to a few called the Windows Insider community. They will carefully study the diagnostics data, the feedback from the tests and from the insiders before general public release. What caused the issue? In the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, users with KFR reported an extra copy of Known Folders on their computer. Code was introduced in the October 2018 Update to remove these empty folders. That change, with another change to the update construction sequence, resulted in the deletion of the original “old” folder locations and their content. The PCs were left only with the new “active” folder. The file deletion issue happened if Known Folder Redirection (KFR) was enabled before the update. KFR is the process of redirecting the known Windows folders like Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Screenshots, Videos etc. from the default folder location to a new folder location. The files were deleted since they remained in the original “old” folder location instead of being moved to the new, redirected location. Further actions The team apologized for any impact these issues had on the users. In the blog John Cable, Director of Program Management, Windows Servicing and Delivery stated: “We will continue to closely monitor the update and all related feedback and diagnostic data from our Windows Insider community with the utmost vigilance. Once we have confirmation that there is no further impact we will move towards an official re-release of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update.” For more details visit the official Microsoft Blog. Microsoft pulls Windows 10 October update after it deletes user files Microsoft Your Phone: Mirror your Android phone apps on Windows .NET Core 2.0 reaches end of life, no longer supported by Microsoft

bpftrace is a DTrace like tool for troubleshooting kernel problems. It was created about a year ago by Alastair Robertson and the GitHub repository was made public recently. It has plenty of features to relate it to DTrace 2.0. bpftrace bpftrace is an open source high level tracing tool which allows analyzing systems. It is now more competent and built for modern extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF). eBPF is a part of the Linux kernel and is popular in systems engineering. Robertson recently developed struct support, and applied it to tracepoints. Struct support was also applied to kprobes. bpftrace uses existing Linux kernel facilities like eBPF, kprobes, uprobes, tracepoints, and perf_events. It also uses bcc libraries. bpftrace uses a lex/yacc parser internally to convert programs into abstract syntax tree (AST). Then llvm intermediate representation actions are done and finally, then BPF is done. Source: GitHub bpftrace and DTrace bpftrace is a higher-level front end for custom ad-hoc tracing. It can play a similar role as DTrace. There are some things eBPF can do and DTrace can't, one of them being the ability to save and retrieve stack traces as variables. Brendan Gregg, one of the contributors of bpftrace states in his blog: “We've been adding bpftrace features as we need them, not just because DTrace had them. I can think of over a dozen things that DTrace can do that bpftrace currently cannot, including custom aggregation printing, shell arguments, translators, sizeof(), speculative tracing, and forced panics.” A one-liner tutorial and reference guide is available on GitHub for learning bpftrace. For more details and trying bpftrace head on to the GitHub repository and Brendan Gregg’s blog. NVTOP: An htop like monitoring tool for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux LLVM 7.0.0 released with improved optimization and new tools for monitoring Xamarin Test Cloud for API Monitoring [Tutorial]

The Windows 10 October update was available for download around the time of the Surface event last week. While the update brought features like Your Phone App and Windows Timeline, users also experienced massive file deleting from their systems. Microsoft had excluded the update from some devices due to compatibility issues with newer processors. The issue was reported by users in the early stages before mass rollout. Users could manually download and install the Windows October 2018 Update from October 2. Rollout was to be pushed October 9 for Patch Tuesday. Microsoft recommends contacting their customer support if the update has deleted your files. The support site advices: “If you have manually downloaded the Windows 10 October 2018 Update installation media, please don’t install it and wait until new media is available.” As of now, it is not known how many users faced this issue. Windows updates are not known to be smooth, causing some issues and errors. But it is unusual that an issue of this magnitude was not detected in Microsoft’s testing of the Windows update. Earlier this year, Microsoft had delayed the Windows 10 April 2018 because of Blue Screen of Death issues. But the issues in that update were rectified before the update reached regular users. Fortunately, this update wasn’t mass rolled out and the issue was detected in an early stage. This serves as a reminder to users to create a backup of important files before an OS update. When Microsoft continues mass rollout of this update, the issue will be fixed, but it is safe to backup your data in any case. The official support page states: “We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating.” There are comments on the support page, where users are stating the problem. For more details visit the Microsoft support website. Microsoft Your Phone: Mirror your Android phone apps on Windows What’s new in the Windows 10 SDK Preview Build 17704 Microsoft Cloud Services get GDPR Enhancements

Last week, Google project zero criticized Ubuntu and Debian developers for not merging kernel security fixes fast enough and leaving users exposed in the meantime. The kernel community clarified yesterday on how it is making attempts to reduce and control the bugs in the Linux ecosystem by testing and kernel hardening. They acknowledge that there is not a lot the kernel community can do to eliminate bugs as bugs are part and parcel of software development. But they are focusing on testing to find them. Now there is a security team in the kernel community made up of kernel developers who are well versed with kernel core concepts. Linux Kernel developer Kroah Hartman said: “A bug is a bug. We don’t know if a bug is a security bug or not. There is a famous bug that I fixed and then three years later Red Hat realized it was a security hole”. In addition to fixing bugs, the kernel community will contribute to hardening to the kernel. Kernel hardening enables additional kernel-level security mechanisms to improve the security of the system. Linux Kernel Developer Kees Cook and others have made huge efforts to take hardening features that have been traditionally outside of the kernel and merge them for the kernel. Cook provides a summary of all the new hardening features added with every kernel released. Hardening the kernel is not enough, new features need to be enabled to take advantage of them which is not happening. A stable kernel is released every week at the official Kernel website. Then, companies pick one to support for a longer period of time for enabling device manufacturers to take advantage of it. However, Hartman observed that barring Google Pixel, most Android phones don’t include the additional hardening features, making all those phones vulnerable. He added that companies should enable these features. Hartman stated: “I went out and bought all the top of the line phones based on kernel 4.4 to see which one actually updated. I found only one company that updated their kernel,” he said.  “I'm working through the whole supply chain trying to solve that problem because it's a tough problem. There are many different groups involved -- the SoC manufacturers, the carriers, and so on. The point is that they have to push the kernel that we create out to people.” However, the big vendors like Red Hat and SUSE keep the kernel updated which have these features. The kernel community is also working with Intel to mitigate Meltdown and Spectre attacks. Intel changed its approach in how they work with the kernel community after these vulnerabilities were discovered. The bright side to this is that the Intel vulnerabilities proved that things are getting better for the kernel community. More testing is being done, patches are being made and efforts are put to make the kernel as bug-free as possible. To know more, visit the Linux Blog. Introducing Wasmjit: A kernel mode WebAssembly runtime for Linux Linux programmers opposed to new Code of Conduct threaten to pull code from project Linus Torvalds is sorry for his ‘hurtful behavior’, is taking ‘a break (from the Linux community) to get help’

Fedora 29 Beta was made available yesterday. It is the next big step towards a stable release of the Linux distribution. The stable version will be available late October. This beta brings features like modularity for all, support for GNOME 3.30 and some other changes. Modularity Modular repositories were introduced in Fedora 28 for the Fedora Server Edition. In Fedora 29 beta, modularity is available in all the editions, spins and labs. Modularity makes multiple versions of important packages available in parallel. It will work with the familiar Dandified YUM (DNF) package. With modularity, users can update their OS to the latest version while maintaining the required version of an application for proper functionality. GNOME 3.30 Fedora 29 Workstation Beta comes with the latest version of GNOME. GNOME 3.30 streamlines performance and adds a new application for Podcasts. It also automatically updates Flatpaks in Software Center. Other changes There are also many other updates included in the Fedora 29. Fedora Atomic Workstation is now rebranded as Fedora Silverblue. The GRUB menu will be hidden where only a single OS is installed as it does not provide any useful functionality in those cases. The latest version of Fedora also brings updates to many popular packages including MySQL, GNU C Library, Python, and Perl. Some architecture changes include dropping as an alternative architecture, initial support for field programming gate array (FPGAs), and packages are now built with SSE2 support. Many projects including Eclipse have dropped support for the big endian ppc64 architecture. So now Fedora will have to discontinue producing any ppc64 content. Fedora Scientific will now be shipped as vagrant boxes which were previously delivered as ISO files. Vagrant boxes will give potential users a friendlier option to try Fedora Scientific while keeping the current operating system. For a full list of changes, visit the Fedora website. GIMP gets $100K of the $400K donation made to GNOME GNOME 3.30 released with improved Desktop performance, Screen Sharing, and more Linus Torvalds is sorry for his ‘hurtful behavior’, is taking ‘a break (from the Linux community) to get help’

Last week, the Ubuntu community announced the release of Mir 1.0.0, a fast, open and secure display server. The important highlights of this release are support for the Wayland xdg-shell (stable) extension and improved facilities for customizing display layouts. Mir is a system-level component that can be used to unlock next-generation user experiences. It runs on a range of Linux powered devices including traditional desktops, IoT and embedded products. Highlights in Mir 1.0.0 Wayland extension protocols At present, there are many Wayland “extension protocols” to provide specialized support for specific needs. Mir will continue to implement those protocols that are important for the projects that it supports. With the Mir 1.0.0 release, the list of supported extension protocols is: protocol name=“wayland” protocol name=“xdg_shell_unstable_v6” protocol name=“xdg_shell” These are sufficient for the vast majority of desktop and IoT applications. Display layout Mir has a new .display configuration file that tells it how to organize multiple outputs. This is described in Display Configuration for mir-kiosk and Egmde snap: update 0.2 As Mir is designed to handle a wide range of platforms, Mir can be used to create a Wayland based “Desktop Environment” or “Shell”. A couple of examples that use Mir are: Unity8 Egmde Developers using Mir will find it packaged and available on Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch; and soon on Debian. The latest Mir release is available for all supported Ubuntu series from the Mir team’s ‘Release PPA’. To know more about Mir 1.0.0 in detail, visit Ubuntu community blog. Ubuntu free Linux Mint Project, LMDE 3 ‘Cindy’ Cinnamon, released Bodhi Linux 5.0.0 released with updated Ubuntu core 18.04 and a modern look What to expect from upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 release  

Linux is one of the most popular operating systems built around the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds. Because it is free and open source, it gained a huge audience among developers very fast. Torvalds further welcomed other developers’ contributions to add to the kernel granted that they keep their contributions free. Due to this, thousands of developers have been working to improve Linux over the years, leading to its huge popularity today. Yesterday, Linus, who has been working on the Kernel for almost 30-years caught the Linux community by surprise as he apologized and opened up about going on a break over his ‘hurtful’ behavior that ‘contributed to an unprofessional environment’. In a long email to the Linux Kernel mailing list, Torvalds announced Linux 4.19 release candidate and then talked about his ‘look yourself in the mirror’ moment. “This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry” admitted Torvalds. The confession came about after Torvalds confessed to messing up the schedule of the Maintainer's Summit, a meeting of Linux's top 40 or so developers, by planning a family vacation. “Yes, I was somewhat embarrassed about having screwed up my calendar, but honestly, I was mostly hopeful that I wouldn't have to go to the kernel summit that I have gone to every year for just about the last two decades. That whole situation then started a whole different kind of discussion --  I realized that I had completely mis-read some of the people involved,” confessed Torvalds. Torvalds has been notorious for his outspoken nature and outbursts towards others (especially the developers in the Linux Community). Sarah Sharps, Linux maintainer quit the Linux community in 2015 over Torvald’s offensive behavior and called it ‘toxic’. Torvalds exploded at Intel, earlier this year, for spinning Spectre fix as a security feature. Also, Torvalds responded with profanity, last year, about different approaches to security during a discussion about whitelisting the proposed features for Linux version 4.15. “Maybe I can get an email filter in place so that when I send email with curse-words, they just won't go out. I really had been ignoring some fairly deep-seated feelings in the Community...I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person...I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely,” writes Torvalds. Torvalds then went ahead to talk about him taking a break from the Linux Community. “This is not some kind of "I'm burnt out, I need to just go away" break. I'm not feeling like I don't want to continue maintaining Linux. I very much want to continue to do this project that I've been working on for almost three decades. I need to take a break to get help on how to behave differently and fix some issues in my tooling and workflow”. A discussion with over 500 comments has started already on Reddit regarding Torvald’s decision.  While some people are supporting Torvald by accepting his apology, there are others who feel that the apology was long overdue and will believe him after he puts his words into action. https://twitter.com/TejasKumar_/status/1041527028271312897 https://twitter.com/coreytabaka/status/1041468174397399041 Python founder resigns – Guido van Rossum goes ‘on a permanent vacation from being BDFL’ Facebook and Arm join Yocto Project as platinum members for embedded Linux development NSA researchers present security improvements for Zephyr and Fucshia at Linux Security Summit 201

The Linux Mint Project community announced the release of LMDE 3 Cinnamon, codenamed as ‘Cindy’. LMDE(Linux Mint Debian Edition) is a Linux Mint project where the main goal of Linux Mint team is to see how viable their distribution would be and how much work would be necessary if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. LMDE aims to be similar to Linux Mint, but without the use of Ubuntu. Instead, LMDE package base is provided by Debian. LMDE 3 Cindy includes some bug and security fixes. However, the Debian base package stands unchanged. Mint and desktop components are updated continuously. Once ready, the newly developed features get directly into LMDE. These changes are staged for inclusion in the next upcoming Linux Mint point release, which is not yet disclosed. System requirements for LMDE 3 ‘Cindy’ Cinnamon 1GB RAM (2GB recommended for a comfortable usage) 15GB of disk space (20GB recommended) 1024×768 resolution (on lower resolutions, press ALT to drag windows with the mouse if they don’t fit in the screen) Some known issues resolved Locked root account The root account is now locked by default. To use the recovery console (from the Grub menu) or log in as root, one has to first give a new password to root: sudo passwd root Secure Boot If the computer is using Secure Boot one needs to disable it. Debian Stretch and LMDE 3 does not support it. Virtualbox Guest Additions To add support for shared folders, drag and drop, proper acceleration and display resolution in Virtualbox, click on the "Devices" menu of Virtualbox and choose "Insert Guest Additions CD Image". Choose "download" when asked and follow the instructions. Read Installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions for more details. Sound and microphone issues If there’s any issue with the microphone or the sound output, install ‘pavucontrol’. This will add "PulseAudio Volume Control" to the menu. The ‘pavucontrol’ application has more configuration options than the default volume control. Issues with KDE apps If one’s experiencing issues with KDE apps (Okular, Gwenview, KStars..etc), they can run the following command: apt install kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins Read more about this release in detail in LMDE 3 Documentation. Facebook and Arm join Yocto Project as platinum members for embedded Linux development Bodhi Linux 5.0.0 released with updated Ubuntu core 18.04 and a modern look Google becomes a new platinum member of the Linux Foundation