Monthly Archives: August 2015

26 Aug

Happy 24th birthday, Linux!

Can you believe Linux is celebrating 24 years already? It was on this day, August 25, back in 1991 when a young Linus Torvalds made his now-legendary announcement on the comp.os.minix newsgroup:

Hello everybody out there using minix –

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them 🙂

Linus

PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

Quite an understated beginning if I ever heard one!

There’s some debate in the Linux community as to whether we should be celebrating Linux’s birthday today or on October 5 when the first public release was made, but Linus says he is O.K. with you celebrating either one, or both! So as we say happy birthday, let’s take a quick look back at the years that have passed and how far we have come.

Via OpenSource.

25 Aug

Lubuntu 15.10 beta 1

Beta 1 is now available for testing, please help test it. New to testing? Head over to the wiki for all the information and background you need, along with contact points.

Also, there’s a new Facebook group named LubuntuQA for testing new Lubuntu ISOs, as well as bug triage. You can find it here.

And at last, but not least, a new ISO made by Julien Lavergne with the LXQt desktop integrated, just for testing Lubuntu Next evolution, is available here.

11 Aug

Get Facebook on Pidgin

Facebook made some changes in his API, so any account trying to access from Pidgin Instant Messenger was unsuccessful, until now, thanks to James Geboski and his new plugin for (L)Ubuntu, Debian and OpenSuse. To install put these five command lines in your terminal:

 

sudo sh -c “echo ‘deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jgeboski/xUbuntu_$(lsb_release -rs)/ /’ >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jgeboski.list” c

cd /tmp && wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jgeboski/xUbuntu_15.04/Release.key

sudo apt-key add – < Release.key

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install purple-facebook

Now open Pidgin, create a new Facebook account (important, not a Facebook XMPP one). This plugin will keep up to date, as the developer will upgrade it. Maybe further versions of Lubuntu or Pidgin will ship this by default. Enjoy!

07 Aug

Firefox exploit found in the wild

Yesterday morning, August 5, a Firefox user informed us that an advertisement on a news site in Russia was serving a Firefox exploit that searched for sensitive files and uploaded them to a server that appears to be in Ukraine. This morning Mozilla released security updates that fix the vulnerability. All Firefox users are urged to update to Firefox 39.0.3. The fix has also been shipped in Firefox ESR 38.1.1.

The vulnerability comes from the interaction of the mechanism that enforces JavaScript context separation (the “same origin policy”) and Firefox’s PDF Viewer. Mozilla products that don’t contain the PDF Viewer, such as Firefox for Android, are not vulnerable. The vulnerability does not enable the execution of arbitrary code but the exploit was able to inject a JavaScript payload into the local file context. This allowed it to search for and upload potentially sensitive local files.

Head to the Facebook Official Group the get more info about the updates.

07 Aug

Lubuntu 14.04.3 LTS

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS
(Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products,
as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support. And that includes, of course, Lubuntu.

We have expanded our hardware enablement offering since 12.04, and with
14.04.3, this point release contains an updated kernel and X stack for
new installations to support new hardware across all our supported
architectures, not just x86.
As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated
installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to
be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and
corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining
stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Official announcement here. Download it here.