GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 19, 2025

• Linux Made Simple ☛ 2025-04-13 [Older] Linux Weekly Roundup #320

• The Register UK ☛ Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

  It may be a holiday Friday in much of the Reg-reading world but that won't stop us from delivering another installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that tells your tech support tales.

  This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Finn" who once worked for a very large hosting and domain registry outfit and found himself managing a young man with no experience or obviously relevant skills.

  The youngster was hired after his mother visited her hairdresser and worried out loud that her son would never get a job "because he spends all day in his bedroom on his computer."

• Kernel Space

  • Dave Scott ☛ Reflections on Unikernels

    Unikernels are single-purpose appliances where an application is linked with everything that it needs, including kernel drivers, into a single binary which can be run in the cloud. Our 2013 paper ("Unikernels: Library Operating Systems for the Cloud") won one of the Influential Paper Awards at the 2025 ASPLOS conference.

• Games

  • [Old] XBill ☛ XBill

    More popular than Quake!

    Ever get the feeling that nothing is going right? You're a sysadmin, and someone's trying to destroy your computers. The little people running around the screen are trying to infect your computers with Wingdows [TM], a virus cleverly designed to resemble a popular operating system. Additionally, some computers are connected with network cables. When one computer on a network becomes infected, a spark will be sent down the cable, and will infect the computer on the other end when it reaches there.

• Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • This Week in GNOME ☛ This Week in GNOME: #196 Dot Release

      Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 11 to April 18.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • New Releases

    • Barry Kauler ☛ EasyOS Kirkstone-series maintenance release 5.9

      The previous release was 5.8.5: [...]

  • BSD

    • Undeadly ☛ Graphed and measured: running TCP input in parallel

      Over on tech@, Alexander Bluhm (bluhm@) is airing a patch to improve parallel TCP input, and is looking for testers: [...]

  • Debian Family

    • The Register UK ☛ Google and AWS: Linux too hard, so customers move to Azure

      When moving to the cloud, companies with significant investments in Microsoft infrastructure wares simply can't afford to rewrite everything for Linux, so they end up migrating to Azure to dodge the markups Redmond charges for running its server software in competitors' clouds.

      Or so say both Amazon and Google in their latest submissions to the Competition and Markets Authority’s investigation into the health of the UK cloud market. The upshot, they claim, is that customers face the devil's choice of migrating to Azure, or paying many times more to run their Windows and SQL Server-based apps on AWS or Google's cloud platform.

    • Sven Hoexter: Trixie Upgrade and X11 Clipboard Manager Madness

      Due to my own laziness and a few functionality issues my "for work laptop" is still using a 15+ year old setup with X11 and awesome. Since trixie is now starting its freeze, it's time to update that odd machine as well and look at the fallout. Good news: It's mostly my own resistance to change which required some kick in the back to move on.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Witekio Offering Ubuntu Pro for Devices in Partnership with Canonical

      Witekio, an Avnet subsidiary, announced it has joined a strategic collaboration with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, to introduce various innovations for the fast growing embedded and IoT markets. Witekio is already an authorized provider for Ubuntu Pro for Devices, Canonical’s comprehensive subscription for open-source security.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Linuxiac ☛ Calibre 8.3 eBook Manager Brings Enhanced Performance

    Among the most notable changes is a 30% speed improvement when opening large EPUB files in the eBook viewer. This builds on similar enhancements introduced in earlier versions, further trimming down the wait time for readers diving into hefty digital tomes.