Hello everyone and welcome to a week of Linux news for the 22nd January 2017.
I want to look back at the Linux distribution review I made this week - Ultimate Edition 5.1
It really was a mess with the broken themes and I’m glad to see a few of you
guys shared my thoughts. Looking back I perhaps should have passed on reviewing it..
The next distro I’m looking at is a complete contrast OB Revenge is based on Arch Linux
and uses the Openbox desktop. The developer has bought something a bit more unique to
the table. And for the cherry on top of the pudding, I mentioned a couple of minor points
in the Google+ community page, and the developer responded within one hour thanking me for
the feedback and stated he will be working to resolve the issues.
Wow quality customer service right there, I look forward to producing a full review
later in the week.
Onwards with the news, and it's going to be a bit hardware oriented this week…
Compulab have launched a new fanless PC named Intense PC3 “IPC3” which runs Linux Mint
on a dual-core Kaby Lake i5/i7 CPU. It’s classed as an industrial PC, but honestly
I think the style is simple enough, that it wouldn’t look out of place as a home PC.
The case dimensions are 19 x 16 x 4cm, and the case is an all-metal ruggedised unit which
is shaped to passively cool the 15W CPU
Linux Gizmos have written an article on the new IPC3:
Like most Kaby Lake boards we’ve seen, the IPC3 supports Intel’s dual-core, low-power
U-Series Core i7 and i5 processors. This is a barebone device without a pre-loaded OS,
but it supports Linux and Windows. Compulab lists Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon as its “Official
Linux.” The Israeli company has long collaborated with the Linux Mint community in selling special
MintBox versions of its Fitlet mini-PCs with preloaded Linux Mint.
The IPC3 can be pre-ordered now from Compulab starting from $693 for the IPC3 i5, listed
as “available soon,” and starting from $829 for the new IPC3 i7, which will
ship in five weeks. Base prices don’t include RAM, HDD, OS, shipping, duty, or VAT
I’ve included a link in the description to the Linuz Gizmos article where you check
out the rest of the specs.
On the other end of the spectrum for Linux computers we have a new release of Endless
cheap computers, which will be shipping to the United States.
Specs of the new Mission Mini and Mission One are lower than the Compulab IPC3, the
choice is a 1.5GHz ARM processor with 2GB RAM which costs $129 and a 2.16GHz Intel Celeron
processor which costs $259. The systems ship with a custom Linux distribution called EndlessOS
The cases Endless have designed look beautiful with the wooden and I’m guessing plastic.
Nice picture showing the device in use as well.
These simple computers would appeal more to basic family use for web browsing, office
applications, and simple gaming. With the Linux OS it will certainly deliver a fast
useable system.
Of course they are never going to compete with a custom build system, but not everyone
has the skills or time to build a custom computer. I think the unique style could certainly win
a lot of less technically minded customers. Actually even I like the style and would be
tempted, but the spec is a bit too low for my requirements.
I might have to take a look at EndlessOS sometime...
OS Tech Nix have written a guide on how to check the password complexity and this actually
precedes my next video very nicely, which is how to crack the 12+ character passwords.
The general advice given here in by OS Tech Nix with using the cracklib-check tool is
not to use a dictionary password. Yes that is valid, although there is a little more
to it, like you can use a four dictionary word long password mixed with upper and lower
case letters, and including numbers and punctuation, and it will be able to withstand attack for
months or even years.
Consider how valuable the data is that you are protecting, and base your password complexity
off that. Or use a password manager.
OS Tech Nix mention a valid point about not using actual answers in security questions,
because all too often companies storing this data do so in clear text.
Actually a point that they haven’t mentioned is that most people share the exact same data
in their social media profile. Mothers maiden name, date of birth, and town you grew up
in is data that most sheeple are all too willing to share with the world.
eBay have been bugging me for ages to fill in security questions, but I’m refusing.
Why? Because they don’t store passwords in a hash or bcrypt form (I’m guessing that
because of the limits they impose), and they’ve already lost everyone’s password data at
least once before. Why should I believe that they store the answers
to security questions in a strong enough manner? I don’t, so I won’t give them any more
data. A strong enough password is good enough for me.
Softpedia report that Oracle have released an update to Virtualbox.
Both VirtualBox 5.1.14 and VirtualBox 5.0.32 are bugfix releases that only add various
improvements to the virtual machine manager, graphical user interface, VBoxSVC process,
OVF and NVMe support, as well as platform specific changes, such as better support for
the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel for Linux hosts.
I’m not sure if it was a coincidence, but when I ran the Virtualbox manager yesterday
I didn’t suffer a Kwin crash. It used to happen every single time I went into the Guest
OS settings. Although since KDE Plasma 5.8 the severity
of the crashes has reduced to the point of suffering a full screen redraw and a popup
box in the corner informing me of a crash. Yeah that’s it really, no data has been
lost and I carry on working as though nothing happened.
I only picked up the update to Virtualbox yesterday, so it's too early to say if the
issue has been solved for me.
Omg Ubuntu have written an article on new plans for the open source image editor Gimp
version 2.10. It will contain a new image processing framework
called Generic Graphics Library or GEGL for short.
There are five new theme colours for the user interface.
‘Unified Transform’ combines the rotation, scaling, skewing, and perspective adjustment
options in to a single tool. ‘Warp Transform’ replaces the old iWarp plugin and works directly
on images, as does the new scaling, rotating, and perspective
correction tool ‘Handle Transform‘.
Updates to various tools will also feature, including new blend, align and move tools.
The text tool will work more like Photoshop’s.
Another major change is in how the app handles linear/gamma-corrected workflows and layer
modes. I’m certainly interested to see what the
brand new version of Gimp will be like, although I have to admit I’m not a huge user of Gimp.
I consider Gimp more of an image editor rather than a creator.
And I consider Inkscape more of an image creator rather than an editor.
Most of my imaging work, especially for my YouTube channel, is based around image creation.
OMG Ubuntu have also included details on how to install the latest development build of
Gimp 2.9 in Ubuntu by adding a Launchpad repository.
As always links to these articles are in the video description.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned about the new version of Inkscape version 0.92 and it
featured a change on pixels per inch sizing to conform with new CSS standards.
Well it turns out that change has had an enormous impact for artist of Pepper and Carrot comics,
which as they’ve shown it severely affects the line spacing.
No big deal right, it only affects a couple of images?
Oh it affects 10,804 images. Ouch!
And on that note, that concludes the week of Linux news. Thanks for watching and I’ll
see you all later.