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Who Will Build The Builders | LINUX Unplugged 109

chris

Debian aims for reproducible builds of all packages. We’ll explain what that means & why other distributions might be jumping onboard with the idea.

Plus impressive early performance results under Mir & Gnome’s 3.18’s best features you’re not hearing about.

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System XVI is a modern take on service management. It aims to incorporate useful functionality while maintaining a modular design in the UNIX tradition.

Jose Macbook Linux feedback

From: Sean
RE: Jose Macbook Linux feedback

I’ve been running Linux on my macbook pro for about 4 years now, I just switched back to Fedora 22 from OpenSuse (been rocking Suse since 2007) and my macbook has never worked better.

The newer kernel 4.1+ finally has good hardware support for the keyboard backlight, thermal/fan controls, cpu scaling (yes Apple does their own crap for this) so battery life is still good.

One other thing that I’ve done to extend battery life is buy the Fluendo codec suite and switch to a gstreamer based video player, the fluendo codecs have much better video acceleration for video decoding, taking much of the load off the cpu.

Also, not all gstreamer video players are created equal; totem is still pretty heavy on the cpu, 24% on 1080p h.264 video, but something lightweight like MPV sits around 12%, and this is on a Sandy Bridge i5.

I haven’t tried Arch on here but I imagine getting a similar setup wouldn’t be too hard. I wish Jose the best of luck, don’t give up on Linux.

Name for the road show

From: Zek the Penguin
RE: Name for the road show

Hi Chris!

Was listening to Unplugged today and figured I’d make suggestions for the road show.

How about ‘Nation Migration’? ‘March of the Penguin’? ‘Roll Your Own’?

Just a few ideas. Hope it helps.

Linux Academy

Ubuntu Convergence Demo: X Apps Running on Mir Display Server

The video was filmed by Canonical at a recent developer sprint. The video was distributed internally to better demonstrate the progress made on the X.org compatability layer for Mir.

DigitalOcean

How Debian Is Trying to Shut Down the CIA and Make Software Trustworthy Again

In response to the Snowden revelation that the CIA compromised Apple developers’ build process, thus enabling the government to insert backdoors at compile time without developers realizing, Debian, the world’s largest free software project, has embarked on a campaign to to prevent just such attacks. Debian’s solution? Reproducible builds.

Reproducible builds, as the name suggests, make it possible for others to reproduce the build process. “The idea is to get reasonable confidence that a given binary was indeed produced by the source,” Lunar said. “We want anyone to be able to produce identical binaries from a given source.”

A software package reproducibly built should be byte for byte identical to the publicly-available package. Any difference would be evidence of tampering.

Reproducible builds rely in part on David A. Wheeler’s solution to this problem, Diverse Double-Compiling.

“You need two compilers,” Lunar explained, “with one that you somehow trust. Then you build the compiler under test twice, once with each compiler, and then you use the compilers that you just built to build the compiler under test again.

“If the output is the same, then no backdoors,” he added. “But for this scheme to work, you need to be able to compare that both build outputs are the same. And that’s exactly what we are enabling when having reproducible builds.”

According to Lunar, 83 percent of Debian packages are now built reproducibly, and more join the party every day.

TING

Gnome 3.18’s Best new Features

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