For those wondering how Google manages the Linux kernel sources they use for shipping on the dozens of different Chromebooks and maintaining the support for the respective cycles, Douglas Anderson of Google presented at last week's Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego on the matter.

Google tries to stick close to the upstream kernel as possible to reduce their maintenance burden as well as making it easier to upstream changes. Google engineers pick an LTS kernel on an annual basis that they use for all devices for the given year.

Marketing is as crucial as code to any open source project’s success. Organizations that participate in open source projects play a vital role in developing a sustainable ecosystem around a project by marketing the project through their own networks. Organizations, in turn, benefit from those marketing efforts by growing their visibility in the project community and associating their own brand with the project. The benefits can be seen in a growing project leadership role, attracting developers to your organization, and promoting your open source products and services. The key is to promote the project first and always remain authentic and true to the open source ethos of openness and transparency.

Linux is not only the server-side operating system as it is already creating a big impact in desktop and laptop segment too. There are plenty of Linux based operating systems developed for different purposes.

In this post, we are going to write about some of the best Linux distros suitable for the Laptops in 2019.

Sometimes, the simplest questions take you on exciting journies. This was, in fact, the most powerful and motivating force that got me into doing computery things from a very young age. I would ask a question, how do I X? And after some poking around I discover that I can't do X without learning about Y and Some Authoritative Resource says you definitely can't do Y without also knowing the arcane black magic of Z. And so on and so forth until I get myself so buried in tangents that at a certain point, I have no choice but to stop and come up for air. Or a potty break and snack.

In the glamorous tech sector, we call these things rabbit holes. Unless you got into tech solely for the money (you monster), it's stuff like this that we nerds live for. It's how we got our start and crucially, it's how we continue to learn and hone our skillset.

But what, you ask, does a rabbit hole look like? And anyway, don't rabbits live in dens or burrows? First of all, nobody asked you to critique the metaphor. Second, I'll show you. This isn't the deepest or most complex rabbit hole that I've stumbled down but it is recent and that counts for something when I'm itching to write something. Please feel free to follow along on your own instance of Ubuntu 18.04 if you have one handy. When you log into such a host, you are greeted with 27 lines of this here nonsense: [...]

Once more free software activists from Vienna used the opportunity of the local vegan summer festival to inform about the possibility to increase our independence on computers and mobile devices. It was the second such event in Vienna this year. But unlike the first which was directly in the city center with loads of passers by this street festival took place in Viennas big recreation area on the island in the Danube river. It is rather close to the city center also and therefore many local people visit it in their spare time. The organisers estimated 9000 visitors per day.

The FSFE booth was manned there all the time from Saturday between 12:00 and 21:00 and Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00. It had a great spot far enough away from the stage with live music in order to allow undisturbed conversations and still close enough to the other 90 stalls with drinks, food, merchantise and a variety of stalls on other subjects like animal welfare, veganism sustainability, shelters and environmental protection.

Since it was an outdoor event on a meadow and because we don’t own a tent we couldn’t hang-up our posters. We just used our umbrella to not be exposed directly to the strong summer sun. And we had huge luck with the weather. Shortly after the festival was closed down on Saturday heavy rain started and it lasted until shortly before the event started again the next day.

Over the years we have collected a few regulars on our information stalls who normally drop by but again mostly totally new people frequented our FSFE information desk. Many of them had no prior knowledge what free software is about. Most of the time we were engaged in conversations with interested people and many explicitly thanked us for being there. We frequently explained why we man an FSFE information stall on a vegan summer festival: If you use the same ethical considerations that lead people to adopt a vegan life style in information technology you end up with free software.

As in previous years we’re going to have an audio miniconference so we can get together and talk through issues, especially design decisions, face to face. This year’s event will be held on Sunday October 31st in Lyon, France, the day after ELC-E. This will be held at the Lyon Convention Center (the ELC-E venue), generously sponsored by Intel.

As with previous years let’s pull together an agenda through a mailing list discussion – this announcement has been posted to alsa-devel as well, the most convenient thing would be to follow up to it. Of course if we can sort things out more quickly via the mailing list that’s even better!

If you’re planning to attend please fill out the form here.

Long time not blogged about, however, there is a new release of nx-libs: nx-libs 3.5.99.22.
What is nx-libs?

The nx-libs team maintains a software originally developed by NoMachine under the name nx-X11 (version 3) or shorter: NXv3. For years now, a small team of volunteers is continually improving, fixing and maintaining the code base (after some major and radical cleanups) of NXv3. NXv3 aka x2goagent has been the only graphical backend in X2Go [0], a remote desktop framework for Linux terminal servers, over the past years.

Rootkits originated in the early days of UNIX-based systems. They can be broadly defined as a collection of malicious software and tools used to exploit security vulnerabilities in any UNIX operating system.

But in modern parlance, since Windows systems dominate the cyber ecosystem, rootkits have a much narrower definition — those that target Windows systems. They are divided into those that restrict themselves to the software space (user) of the OS, and those that delve into the deeper levels with direct firmware access (kernel).

Why nothing is working in cyber security?

Cameron has traced the modification to an incident in April last year involving the Webmin development build server being exploited. The vulnerability was added to one of Webmin's scripts, and the timestamp of the modified script was set back so that the modification was not detected.

The same backdoor is present in versions 1.900 to 1.920 of the tool, but is only exploitable if an administrator had enabled the feature to allow the changing of expired passwords.