An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Intel has backtracked on the license for its latest microcode update that mitigates security vulnerabilities in its processors -- after the previous wording outlawed public benchmarking of the chips. The reason for Intel's insistence on a vow of silence is that -- even with the new microcode in place -- turning off hyper-threading is necessary to protect virtual machines from attack via Foreshadow -- and that move comes with a potential performance hit. Predictably, Intel's contractual omerta had the opposite effect and drew attention to the problem. "Performance is so bad on the latest Spectre patch that Intel had to prohibit publishing benchmarks," said Lucas Holt, MidnightBSD project lead, via Twitter.

In response to the outcry, Intel subsequently said it would rewrite the licensing terms. And now the fix is in. Via Twitter, Imad Sousou, corporate VP and general manager of Intel Open Source Technology Center, on Thursday said: "We have simplified the Intel license to make it easier to distribute CPU microcode updates and posted the new version here. As an active member of the open source community, we continue to welcome all feedback and thank the community." The reworked license no longer prohibits benchmarking. Long-time Slashdot reader and open-source pioneer, Bruce Perens, first brought Intel's microcode update to our attention. In a phone interview with The Register, Perens said he approved of the change. "This is a relatively innocuous license for proprietary software and it can be distributed in the non-free section of Debian, which is where is used to be, and it should be distributable by other Linux distributions," he said. "You can't expect every lawyer to understand CPUs. Sometimes they have to have a deep conversation with their technical people."

Long-time Slashdot reader Bruce Perens writes: The Register reports that Debian is rejecting a new Intel microcode update because of a new license term prohibiting the use of the CPU for benchmarks and profiling.

There is a new license term applied to the new microcode: "You will not, and will not allow any third party to (i) use, copy, distribute, sell or offer to sell the Software or associated documentation; (ii) modify, adapt, enhance, disassemble, decompile, reverse engineer, change or create derivative works from the Software except and only to the extent as specifically required by mandatory applicable laws or any applicable third party license terms accompanying the Software; (iii) use or make the Software available for the use or benefit of third parties; or (iv) use the Software on Your products other than those that include the Intel hardware product(s), platform(s), or software identified in the Software; or (v) publish or provide any Software benchmark or comparison test results." UPDATE:: Intel has reworked the license to no longer prohibit benchmarking. Imad Sousou, corporate VP and general manager of Intel Open Source Technology Center, tweeted on Thursday: "We have simplified the Intel license to make it easier to distribute CPU microcode updates and posted the new version here. As an active member of the open source community, we continue to welcome all feedback and thank the community."

BrianFagioli writes: Debian is one of the most important open source projects ever. The Debian Linux operating system is extremely popular in its own right, but also, it is used as the base for countless other distributions. Ubuntu, for instance -- one of the most-used distros -- is Debian-based. Even Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, also has a Debian edition. Not to mention, Raspbian -- the official Raspberry Pi OS -- which is based on Debian too.

Today, Debian is celebrating a very important milestone -- a 25th birthday! Yes, it is seriously that old -- its development was announced on August 16, 1993. When the late Ian Murdock announced 25 years ago in comp.os.linux.development, the imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release, [...] the Debian Linux Release', nobody would have expected the 'Debian Linux Release' would become what's nowadays known as the Debian Project, one of the largest and most influential free software projects. "Its primary product is Debian, a free operating system (OS) for your computer, as well as for plenty of other systems which enhance your life. From the inner workings of your nearby airport to your car entertainment system, and from cloud servers hosting your favorite websites to the IoT devices that communicate with them, Debian can power it all," says Ana Guerrero Lopez of Debian. Further reading: Slackware, Oldest Actively Maintained GNU/Linux Distribution, Turns 25.

Exploit broker Zerodium is offering rewards of up to $500,000 for zero-days in UNIX-based operating systems like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, but also for Linux distros such as Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, and Tails. From a report: The offer, first advertised via Twitter earlier this week, is available as part of the company's latest zero-day acquisition drive. Zerodium is known for buying zero-days and selling them to government agencies and law enforcement. The company runs a regular zero-day acquisition program through its website, but it often holds special drives with more substantial rewards when it needs zero-days of a specific category. The US-based company held a previous drive with increased rewards for Linux zero-days in February, with rewards going as high as $45,000. In another zero-day acquisition drive announced on Twitter this week, the company said it was looking again for Linux zero-days, but also for exploits targeting BSD systems. This time around, rewards can go up to $500,000, for the right exploit.

"Dear Init Freedom Lovers..." begins the announcement at Devuan.org: We are happy to announce that Devuan GNU+Linux 2.0 ASCII Stable is finally available. Devuan is a GNU+Linux distribution committed to providing a universal, stable, dependable, free software operating system that uses and promotes alternatives to systemd and its components.

Devuan 2.0 ASCII runs on several architectures. Installer CD and DVD ISOs, as well as desktop-live and minimal-live ISOs, are available for i386 and amd64. Ready-to-use images can be downloaded for a number of ARM platforms and SOCs, including Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, OrangePi, BananaPi, OLinuXino, Cubieboard, Nokia and Motorola mobile phones, and several Chromebooks, as well as for Virtualbox/QEMU/Vagrant. The Devuan 2.0 ASCII installer ISOs offer a variety of Desktop Environments including Xfce, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, with others available post-install. The expert install mode now offers a choice of either SysVinit or OpenRC as init system...

We would like to thank the entire Devuan community for the continued support, feedback, and collaboration....
The release notes include information on Devuan's new network of package repository mirrors, and they're also touting their "direct and easy upgrade paths" from Devuan Jessie, Debian Jessie and Debian Stretch.

Google today announced Chrome OS is getting Linux support. "As a result, Chromebooks will soon be able to run Linux apps and execute Linux commands," reports VentureBeat. "A preview of Linux on the Pixelbook will be released first, with support for more devices coming soon." From the report: "Just go to wherever you normally get those apps, whether it's on the websites or through apt-get in the Linux terminal, and seamless get those apps like any other Linux distribution," Chrome OS director of product management Kan Liu told VentureBeat.

Support for Linux apps means developers will finally be able to use a Google device to develop for Google's platforms, rather than having to depend on Windows, Mac, or Linux machines. And because Chrome OS doesn't just run Chrome OS-specific apps anymore, developers will be able to create, test, and run any Android or web app for phones, tablets, and laptops all on their Chromebooks. Without having to switch devices, you can run your favorite IDE -- as long as there is a Debian Linux version (for the curious, Google is specifically using Debian Stretch here -- code in your favorite language and launch projects to Google Cloud with the command line.

BrianFagioli writes: For better or worse, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) initiative seems to be moving full steam ahead. There are some very respectable distributions available in the Microsoft Store, such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Kali to name a few. Not to mention, Microsoft is trying to encourage even more maintainers to submit their distros with a new tool.

Apparently, some Windows 10 users have been clamoring for the ability to copy and paste both from and to WSL consoles -- a reasonable request. Well, as of Insider Build 17643, this is finally possible.

'As of Windows 10 Insider build #17643, you can copy/paste text from/to Linux/WSL Consoles!!! We know that this is a feature MANY of you have been waiting for -- our sincerest thanks for your patience and continued support while we untangled the Console's internals, allowing us to implement this feature. To ensure that we don't break any existing behaviors, you'll need to enable the 'Use Ctrl+Shift+C/V as Copy/Paste' option in the Console 'Options' properties page,' says Rich Turner, Microsoft.

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: A vulnerability in the "beep" package that comes pre-installed with Debian and Ubuntu distros allows an attacker to probe for the presence of files on a computer, even those owned by root users, which are supposed to be secret and inaccessible. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-0492, has been fixed in recent versions of Debian and Ubuntu (Debian-based OS). At its core, the bug is a race condition in the beep utility that allows the OS to emit a "beep" sound whenever it is deemed necessary. Security researchers have discovered a race condition in the beep package that allows an attacker to elevate his code to root-level access.

Long-time Slashdot reader Billly Gates writes: Debian is now available in the Windows app store. It joins Ubuntu, Suse Leap, SuSe enterprise, and Kali Linux for those who cannot or do not want to bother with a virtual machine or a full install of the OS. However, it included stable 9.3. 9.4 is available from the repository if you run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.
"Fedora is not yet available, although Microsoft has stated openly that it is working to make it so," reports Computer Weekly. And there's more: Microsoft has also provided an open source tool called Microsoft WSL/DistroLauncher for users who want to build their own Linux package where a particular distribution is either a) not available yet or b) is available, but the user wants to apply a greater degree of customisation to it than comes as standard.

The newly-relaunched Linux Journal is conducting its annual "Reader's Choice Awards," and this month announced the winners for Best Text Editor, Best Laptop, and Best Domain Registrar. Vim was chosen as the best editor by 35% of respondents, handily beating GNU Emacs (19%) Sublime Text (10%) and Atom (8%). Readers' Choice winner Vim is an extremely powerful editor with a user interface based on Bill Joy's 40-plus-year-old vi, but with many improved-upon features including extensive customization with key mappings and plugins. Linux Journal reader David Harrison points out another great thing about Vim "is that it's basically everywhere. It's available on every major platform."
For best laptop their readers picked Lenovo (32%), followed by Dell (25%) and System76 (11%). The ThinkPad began life at IBM, but in 2005, it was purchased by Lenovo along with the rest of IBM's PC business. Lenovo evolved the line, and today the company is well known as a geek favorite. Lenovo's ThinkPads are quiet, fast and arguably have one of the best keyboards (fighting words!). Linux Journal readers say Lenovo's Linux support is excellent, leaving many to ponder why the company doesn't ship laptops with Linux installed.
In February readers also voted on the best web browser, choosing Firefox (57%) over Chrome (17%) and Chromium (7%). And they also voted on the best Linux distribution, ultimately selecting Debian (33%), open SUSE (12%), and Fedora (11%).

An anonymous reader quotes Debian.org: The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian 9 (codename "stretch"). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems... Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 9 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old "stretch" media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.
Phoronix adds that Debian 9.4 "has a new upstream Linux kernel release, various dependency fixes for some packages, an infinite loop fix in Glade, several CVE security fixes, a larger stack size for NTP, a new upstream release of their NVIDIA proprietary driver package, Python 3 dependency fixes, and other security fixes."

BrianFagioli writes: While there is no proof that anything nefarious is afoot, it does feel like maybe the Windows-maker is hijacking the Linux movement a bit by serving distros in its store. I hope there is no "embrace, extend, and extinguish" shenanigans going on.

Just yesterday, we reported that Kali Linux was in the Microsoft Store for Windows 10. That was big news, but it was not particularly significant in the grand scheme, as Kali is not very well known. Today, there is some undeniably huge news -- Debian is joining SUSE, Ubuntu, and Kali in the Microsoft Store. Should the Linux community be worried?

My concern lately is that Microsoft could eventually try to make the concept of running a Linux distro natively a thing of the past. Whether or not that is the company's intention is unknown. The Windows maker gives no reason to suspect evil plans, other than past negative comments about Linux and open source. For instance, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once called Linux "cancer" -- seriously.

Linux Journal: We started things off with Best Linux Distribution, and nearly 10,000 readers voted. The winner was Debian, with many commenting "As for servers, Debian is still the best" or similar. One to watch that is rising in the polls is Manjaro (7 percent), which is independently based on the Arch Linux. Manjaro is a favorite for Linux newcomers and is known for its user-friendliness and accessibility. And, now for the top three LJ winners: Debian (33 percent), openSUSE (12 percent), and Fedora (11 percent).

Romain Dillet reports via TechCrunch: Hacker group fail0verflow shared a photo of a Nintendo Switch running Debian, a distribution of Linux. The group claims that Nintendo can't fix the vulnerability with future firmware patches. According to fail0verflow, there's a flaw in the boot ROM in Nvidia's Tegra X1 system-on-a-chip. When your console starts, it reads and executes a piece of code stored in a read-only memory (hence the name ROM). This code contains instructions about the booting process. It means that the boot ROM is stored on the chip when Nvidia manufactures it and it can't be altered in any way after that. Even if Nintendo issues a software update, this software update won't affect the boot ROM. And as the console loads the boot ROM immediately after pressing the power button, there's no way to bypass it. The only way to fix it would be to manufacture new Nvidia Tegra X1 chips. So it's possible that Nintendo asks Nvidia to fix the issue so that new consoles don't have this vulnerability.

Google has officially confirmed the company is shifting its in-house Linux desktop from the Ubuntu-based Goobuntu to a new Linux distro, the DebianTesting-based gLinux. From a report: Margarita Manterola, a Google Engineer, quietly announced Google would move from Ubuntu to Debian-testing for its desktop Linux at DebConf17 in a lightning talk. Manterola explained that Google was moving to gLinux, a rolling release based on Debian Testing. This move isn't as surprising as it first looks. Ubuntu is based on Debian. In addition, Google has long been a strong Debian supporter. In 2017, Debian credited Google for making [sic] "possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software." Debian Testing is the beta for the next stable version of Debian. With gLinux, that means it's based on the Debian 10 "Buster" test operating system. Google takes each Debian Testing package, rebuilds it, tests it, files and fixes bugs, and once those are resolved, integrates it into the gLinux release candidate. GLinux went into beta on Aug. 16, 2017.

BrianFagioli writes: Today, yet another wildly popular program gets the Snap treatment, and quite frankly, it is arguably more significant than Spotify. What is it? Slack! Yes, Canonical announces that the ubiquitous communication app can be installed as a Snap. True, Slack was already available on the Linux desktop, but this makes installing it and keeping it updated much easier. "In adopting the universal Linux app packaging format, Slack will open its digital workplace up to an-ever growing community of Linux users, including those using Linux Mint, Manjaro, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Solus, and Ubuntu. Designed to connect us to the people and tools we work with every day, the Slack snap will help Linux users be more efficient and streamlined in their work. And an intuitive user experience remains central to the snaps' appeal, with automatic updates and rollback features giving developers greater control in the delivery of each offering," says Canonical.

"Systemd developers split the community over a tiny detail that decreases stability significantly and increases complexity for not much real value." So argues Nico Schottelius, talking about his experiences as the CEO of a Swiss company providing VM hosting, datacenters, and high-speed fiber internet. Long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd quotes Nico's essay: While I am writing here in flowery words, the reason to use Devuan is hard calculated costs. We are a small team at ungleich and we simply don't have the time to fix problems caused by systemd on a daily basis. This is even without calculating the security risks that come with systemd. Our objective is to create a great, easy-to-use platform for VM hosting, not to walk a tightrope...

[W]hat the Devuan developers are doing is creating stability. Think about it not in a few repeating systemd bugs or about the insecurity caused by a huge, monolithic piece of software running with root privileges. Why do people favor Linux on servers over Windows? It is very easy: people don't use Windows, because it is too complex, too error prone and not suitable as a stable basis. Read it again. This is exactly what systemd introduces into Linux: error prone complexity and instability. With systemd the main advantage to using Linux is obsolete.
The essay argues that while Devuan foisted another choice into the community, "it is not their fault. Creating Devuan is simply a counteraction to ensure Linux stays stable. which is of high importance for a lot of people."

An anonymous reader writes: The Debian project is pleased to announce the third update of its stable distribution Debian 9 (codename stretch). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available. The Debian project also announces the tenth update of its oldstable distribution Debian 8 (codename jessie).

Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 9 or 8 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old jessie or stretch DVD/CD media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror. This stable update adds a few important corrections to packages. New installation images will be available soon at the mirrors. Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages, and most such updates are included in the point release. One can use the apt command or apt-get command to apply updates. A step-by-step update guide is posted here.

An anonymous reader writes: Recently completed Linux distro benchmarks by Phoronix show Intel's Clear Linux is the most powerful on x86 hardware. A six-way, enterprise-focused Linux distro comparison show Clear Linux being the fastest with a Core i9 and Xeon systems, easily beating CentOS, openSUSE, and Ubuntu in a majority of the tests.

When doing an 11-way Linux distro boot test they also found Clear Linux easily booted the fastest followed by the Clear-inspired Solus distribution. Clear Linux does work on AMD hardware and works on Intel CPUs back to Sandy Bridge but leverages its speed from optimized compiler settings, specially built libraries capable of AVX instructions on supported systems, a specially tuned kernel configuration, and other optimizations/patches.
Debian 9.2 and Fedora 27 "ended up being dropped from this article due to data overload," the article concludes, "and those distributions really not offering anything really different in terms of the performance."

You asked, he answered!

For Slashdot's 20th anniversary -- and the 23rd anniversary of the first release of Red Hat Linux -- here's a special treat.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has responded to questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Read on for his answers...