Source
r/linux•
Spreadsheet

Been living under a rock for a while… what’ve I missed?

I used to be really interested in Linux… I remembered that when I first got into Linux, Feisty Fawn 7.04 was the current distribution of Ubuntu (I keep time by Ubuntu releases). I stopped following at around the time of 9.10 and 10.04. From then own, I only occasionally saw Linux news, so some of the later releases of Ubuntu sound vaguely familiar to me, however, recently I haven’t been looking at news at all. I’ve never heard of “Precise Pangolin” or “Quantal Quetzal.”

I’ve heard of some important events like Debian Squeeze and Linux 3.0… but that’s it. So, what have I missed? What controversies have I missed? Is Linux still growing? I remember that it had a really big momentum “back then” (not that long ago!). Has memory consumption for various distributions increased a lot?

EDIT: the FreeBSD website hasn't changed! Hooray!

Posted May 15, 2012, 8:31 PM UTC · edited

03
Mac-O-War•

Unity was kind of a big deal. Ubuntu is still hemorrhaging users. Many of us Ubuntu refugees have been displaced. Some of us moved to Mint, while others of us are still lost; aimlessly navigating a strange wasteland of "improved" desktop environments.

4
keeperofdakeys•

X86 windows 8 certification requires that secureboot^1 is enabled, and an option be present in the UEFI configuration to turn it off (that last one wasn't mandated originally, it would have been upto the manufacturer). It basically means if anyone wants to use linux on a windows 8 certified motherboard, they have to go into the UEFI configuration, and by all chances could face a "YOU ARE BOOTING AN UNVERIFIED OS" whenever they boot. It basically is the end of people trying out linux.

Oh, and the ARM windows 8 certification requires secureboot, so any ARM laptops are screwed from the word go.

  1. Basically the motherboard has a cryptographic key in it, and it checks if the bootloader is signed by that key. If it isn't, it doesn't boot. It is a standard of UEFI. It assumes that the bootloader will continue the 'chain of trust' and only let signed things run. If you want more details, read the blog posts Matthew Garret and watch the talk he did at Linuxconf 2012. He is the person working on UEFI support in Linux, and its not pretty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfKF7mEY5Dc (Here is a talk he did) http://mjg59.livejournal.com/ (Read all the UEFI posts from his bog)

3
My-Work-Reddit•

Stuff ...

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