Bits of Linux: 2015 #2

In this edition: Record numbers in Linux kernel development, booting Linux on Chromebooks from USB, a quick look at the largest Chromebook to date, Eben Moglen's and Linus Torvalds' keynotes from linux.conf.au and more.

📰 Articles

An Everyday Linux User Review Of Xubuntu 14.10

A review of Xubuntu 14.10, the lightweight Ubuntu based distro with Xfce, which I consider a good option for laptops for performance and power consumption reasons, especially if your hardware doesn't play nice with very demanding desktop environments.

Linux Kernel Development Hits An All-Time High

The advancement of the Linux kernel in 2014 was impressive with many new features added, a variety of software improvements and 71,092 commits the kernel now has more than 19.1 million lines of code.

Download Linux Voice issue 2

Issue 2 of Linux Voice was released under the Creative Commons BY-SA license covering topics such as how Munich switched to Linux, make your own Raspberry Pi-powered arcade machine, write your first kernel module, and understand how software containers such as Docker work.

3 ways to run 'normal' Linux on a Chromebook

For people who want to tinker, Bryan Lunduke outlines 3 ways to run alternative Linux distributions on Chromebooks.

Installing Linux on the Chromebook Pixel

A step-by-step guide on how to install Linux on a Chromebook pixel. Be sure to know what you want or as the author puts it: Directions provided AS-IS, if you lose all of your data or brick your machine, it's not my problem.

💬 Discussions / Q&A

What are some must-have programs for you?

Reserve time for trying some of the tools Redditors recommend in this thread, there are definitely some true gems among them.

Installing and testing custom code on Chrome OS devices

The Chromium team is adding the ability to easily enable Debugging Features when Chromebooks are booted in Developer Mode, which among others will allow for booting from USB so you can install operating system images from USB drives.

Sharing control of your Chromebook via Chrome Remote Desktop

Chrome Remote Desktop allows users to remotely access another computer through Chrome browser or a Chromebook. With this addition in the Chrome OS Dev Channel, which is currently being tested, you can access your Chromebook remotely.

💻 Linux Devices

Acer Chromebook 15 Introduced at CES 2015

Acer showcased the upcoming Acer Chromebook 15 at the recent CES in Las Vegas. The 15.6" device is the largest Chromebook to date.

Samsung Chromebook 2 500C12 K01

The Samsung Chromebook 2 500C12 K01 has an 11.6" screen with a max resolution of 1366x768 pixels and is powered by a 2.16 GHz Intel Celeron dual-core processor.

Steam In-Home Streaming Demoed on a Toshiba Chromebook 2

This video demonstrates game play on a Toshiba Chromebook 2 running Xubuntu via Crouton using the Steam In-Home Streaming technology.

📖 Open Source Software

detox(1) - Linux man page

The detox utility renames files to make them easier to work with. It removes spaces and other such annoyances. It'll also translate or cleanup Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) characters encoded in 8-bit ASCII, Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8, and CGI escaped characters.

pdfgrep

Pdfgrep is a tool to search text in PDF files working similar to grep. Also see the manual.

Privacy and Security

Blinding The Surveillance State

Christopher Soghoian, a privacy researcher and activist, working at the intersection of technology, law and policy, gave this talk at DEF CON 22 about surveillance and how privacy enhancing technologies can offer protections against it.

Eben Moglen's keynote from linux.conf.au

linux.conf.au 2015 recently took place in Auckland, New Zealand. In his inspiring keynote professor Eben Moglen, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Law Center, talks, among other things, about why freedom and privacy matter. Be sure not to miss this and despite the seriousness there are some pretty fun moments too as this quote at 16m47s exemplifies:

We are after all an exceedingly diverse community, we bridge the entire gap between vi an emacs for example.

😎 Fun Stuff

Another keynote from linux.xonf.au 2015 that is mostly a Q&A session with Linus Torvalds, Bdale Garbee, Andrew Tridgell and Rusty Russell. Despite the serious questions and answers about Linus' controversial leadership style, that receive arguably too much media coverage, this is mostly a fun session to watch and listen to.

Bash Fork Bomb T-Shirt White Print

How to create a fork bomb to crash a computer system? Use this cryptic bash command:

:(){ :|:& };:

A t-shirt with the code for a Bash fork bomb printed in a white monospace font.

Bits of Linux is a bi-weekly round-up of interesting articles, discussions, Q&A, open source software projects, new Linux devices and reviews as well as a dose of fun stuff related to Linux, that have been published or I have discovered during the past 2 weeks. To not miss posts in this series, subscribe to the Bits of Linux RSS feed.

January 19, 2015

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