Lenovo Denies Blocking of Linux Installation on Its Laptops

Lenovo denies that it intentionally blocks the installation of Linux and other operating systems on computers. Wednesday, there were rumors that laptops with Windows 10 Home had this block in the Microsoft Signature Series as a result of an agreement with Microsoft.

The company denies the rumours: “Lenovo has recently switched to RAID configurations for SSDs in some systems, so additional steps are required to use all the features.”

The issue of Lenovo started building-up when a Reddit user got a response from an allegedly Lenovo employee on is negative review of Yoga 900 ISK2 laptop from Lenovo. He had tried to install Linux, but he was unsuccessful due to a particular RAID configuration. In response, suggested the “Lenovo Product Expert”, that this was not possible because Windows Signature devices are “closed following an agreement with Microsoft”. After the Reddit post received more attention, Lenovo limited temporary access to a thread on his forum on this topic.

Grandparents of Text Editing got Updates: Vim to 8.0 and Emacs to 25.1

Text editors Vim 8.0 and Emacs 8.0 are out. The two editors remain heavily used by experts in the Unix world, both by system administrators but also by developers.

We were able to see in the recent Jenkins World 2016 that most presentations (including that carried out by the boss of CloudBees) were accomplished with tools like Vi (Vim, in general), or with Emacs excellent mcedit proposed.

5 Reasons Why You Should Try openSUSE

The Linux users of today are divided into three categories: Debian (Ubuntu), Fedora and Arch Linux. openSUSE is a bit different than those distributions. Keep in mind that there isn’t a better or a worse distribution, not in an absolute sense. A distribution is categorised as better or worse based on our personal expectations and usage of a certain computer.

For example, a network administrator will always consider Kali Linux (Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at advanced Penetration Testing and Security Auditing) to be better than SteamOS (Valve’s specialised gaming operating system based on Linux). However, a gamer will think exactly the opposite.

Here are five reasons why a common user should give openSUSE a try.

Google Search inside Linux Terminal

googler is a power tool to Google (Web & News) and Google Site Search from the command-line. It shows the title, URL and abstract for each result, which can be directly opened in a browser from the terminal. Results are fetched in pages (with page navigation). Supports sequential searches in a single googler instance.

googler was initially written to cater to headless servers without X. You can integrate it with a text-based browser. However, it has grown into a very handy and flexible utility that delivers much more. For example, fetch any number of results or start anywhere, limit search by any duration, define aliases to google search any number of websites, switch domains easily… all of this in a very clean interface without ads or stray URLs. The shell completion scripts make sure you don’t need to remember any options.

googler isn’t affiliated to Google in any way.

Chapeau “Cancellara”, based on Fedora 24, will soon be released

ince Pooley, the developer of Chapeau, has announced that Chapeau 24 “Cancellara” will soon be available for download. This announcement comes after almost a year of complete silence.

Chapeau 23 ” Armstrong ” was released last December and since then we have not heard a word from the developers. A few days ago, Pooley wrote an announcement on the official blog stating that Chapeau 24 is prepared, and is based on Fedora 24.

We took all the time needed to perfect Chapeau 24. As you know, we devote every distro to a cycling champion, this time we have dedicated our work to Fabian Cancellara, said Chapeau lead developer, Vince Pooley.

Chapeau is a high-performance, cutting-edge operating system built from the GNU/Linux distribution Fedora Workstation with the Gnome desktop environment.

In comparison to Fedora, Chapeau adopts a more relaxed approach to software licences and is intended to be just as useful for advanced users as it is easy for those new to using a Linux system There is built-in access to third-party software & sources repositories not included in Fedora such as RPMFusion, DropBox, Steam, Adobe Flash & Oracle VirtualBox.

Tor browser 6.0.5 released for Linux

The Tor project has released the Thor 6.0.5 browser for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The major change is a security exploit fix.

A major change in the 6.0.5 release is the fix of a security loophole that allowed an attacker to obtain a valid certificate from addons.mozilla.org, imitate Mozilla’s servers and serve a malicious update. Tor Browser 6.0.5 also comes with updated HTTPS-Everywhere and a new Tor stable version 0.2.8.7.

Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE Edition Released

Linux Mint 18 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

Clement Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, announced the release of Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE, the new LTS edition of Linux Mint 18 with KDE as a desktop environment.

Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE, based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS , has been in beta until yesterday, but the ISO images for systems to 64-bit and 32-bit are available for download.

Umbreon Virus for Linux, Inspired by Pokemon

Trend Micro, the world leader in Internet data protection and cloud security, has detected a few days ago a new rootkit that targets Linux-based devices. The rootkit is able to strike 32 bits or 64 bits systems based on both Intel or ARM processors. Even embedded systems (such as routers) are at risk.

The name of the rootkit is Umbreon, in the video game Umbreon is a Pokemon that is hiding in the shadows, hence the name of the virus.

After infiltrating your PC Umbreon creates a user account that hackers uses to access the device via SSH. The picture below shows the welcome screen shown when this backdoor account is accessed via SSH.

More than 1700 Games Available for Linux on Steam

Today, the 1700 mark has been crossed. There are currently 1703 games on Steam Store being able to natively run on Linux. It took just over three years to reach this mark, since the first release of Steam for Linux. It might seem like a lot of games considering the percentage of actual Linux computers running Steam games.

According to the Steam hardware and software survey that was taken in November 2015, only 0,98% of total operating systems accessing Steam games are Linux. 95.26% of them are Windows computers and there are ‘only’ about 7000 Windows-based games available on Steam.