Linux Action News 236

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SUSE has a skunkworks distro in development, the transition Debian is struggling with, and some long-awaited improvements to Raspberry Pi OS.

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• openSUSE Developing “Adaptable Linux Platform” For Next-Gen SUSE Linux Enterprise — Another important point is that we intend to split what was a more generic, everything is closely intertwined into two parts: One smaller hardware enabling piece, a kind of "host OS", and the and the layer providing and supporting applications, which will be container (and VM) based.
• Update on next generation of SLE - openSUSE Mailing Lists
• An update to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye — With this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image. This is in line with the way most operating systems work nowadays, and, while it may cause a few issues where software (and documentation) assumes the existence of the “pi” user, it feels like a sensible change to make at this point.
• PipeWire 0.3.50 — WINE applications using the JACK backend should no longer crash.
• OpenSSH 9.0 released — It is claimed to be primarily a bug-fix release, but it also switches to a new, quantum-computer-proof key-exchange protocol by default and includes a number of sftp changes, some of which may create some compatibility issues with scp.
• Reiser5 Issues New Development Release, Performance Numbers For Scaling Out — Shishkin published an new Reiser5 unstable snapshot today that targets Linux 5.16 kernel compatibility. Along with updating Reiser5 for newer kernel compatibility and other changes since its prior snapshot, Shishkin accompanied today's announcement with some benchmark numbers.
• New NVIDIA Open-Source Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Appears — Appearing with NVIDIA's latest Linux4Tegra code drop is a new open-source kernel graphics driver not previously published. This driver isn't based on the existing Nouveau driver but rather appears to be derived from their internal driver code-base with some copyright references going back to 90's.
• NVIDIA Publishes Signed Ampere Firmware To Finally Allow Accelerated Open-Source Support — Even with the signed firmware images, there are still complications around re-clocking the GPU to get off the rather low boot clock frequencies. Those complications around power management in the context of signed firmware images have meant the GTX 900 series and newer hasn't been able to operate with the open-source driver at its optimal clock frequencies...
• Debian still having trouble with merged /usr — The addition of the "/usr merge" feature has been something of longstanding mess in the Debian world. It seems like a relatively innocuous change, but ever since we first covered the feature introduction for Debian—more than six years ago—it has a been a recurring series of headaches within that community. Recent events have seemingly simply prolonged the pain, though perhaps the end is in sight.
• Usr move status in various distros
• The Case For The Usr Merge