News briefs for October 31, 2018.
The Fedora Project Manager announced the official release of Fedora 29 yesterday. This release is the first to include the Fedora Modularity feature across
all variants. Other changes include “GNOME 3.30 on the desktop, ZRAM for our ARM images, and a Vagrant image
for Fedora Scientific”. You can download it from here.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 launched yesterday with improved security. eWeek reports that the new release features “TPM 2.0 support for security authentication, as well as integrating the open source
nftables firewall technology effort”. eWeek quotes principal project manager Steve Almy: “The TPM 2.0 integration in 7.6 provides an additional
level of security by tying the hands-off decryption to server hardware in addition to the network bound disk
encryption (NBDE) capability, which operates across the hybrid cloud footprint from on-premise servers to
public cloud deployments.” Version 7.6 is the second major milestone release of 2018.
Linux Lite 4.2 Final is now available. Linux Lite creator Jerry Bezencon says the release is “a ‘refinement’ and not a ‘major upgrade’.
There are some new wallpapers thanks to @whateverthing and some minor tweaks here and there.” One change with
this version is the addition of
Redshift, which “adjusts the color temperature according to the position of the sun”.
Google and a group of cetologists have been using AI to listen to years of undersea recordings with the hope of
creating “a machine learning model that can spot humpback whale calls”. According to TechCrunch, the project is part of Google’s AI for Social Good
initiative.
Resin.io, a container-based server platform for Linux device management, has “changed its name to balena and released an
open source version of its IoT fleet management platform for Linux devices called openBalena”, Linux
Gizmos reports. Founder and CEO of the company says the name change is due to “to trademark issues, to
cannabis references, and to people mishearing it as ‘raisin'”. balenaOS is “an open
source spinoff of the container-based device software that works with balenaCloud”, and the new openBalena “is an
open version of the balenaCloud server software. Customers can now choose between letting balena manage their
fleet of devices or building their own openBalena based server platform that manages fleets of devices running
balenaOS”.