Distro watch
What’s behind the free software sofa?
UBUNTU 18.04.2
Those who prefer to stick with the LTS releases of Ubuntu will be thrilled that the second point release is now available, sporting an all new Hardware Enablement (HWE) stack. Besides the new 4.18 kernel and applications, a number of performance fixes for Gnome are included. Anyone who installed the first point release will get this one without any intervention, but those who installed the first 18.04 release should follow the instructions at http://bit.ly/lxf248ubuntu.
riot 1.0
Riot, the FOSS flagship chat client for the decentralised Matrix architecture (https://matrix. org), has hit version 1.0. This long-awaited release brings a stylish new user interface, readability improvements and, because no one likes bright and cheery, a dark theme. Riot now features automatic key backups for encrypted conversations, as well as the ability to use emoji for device verification. This is somewhat more user friendly than verifying a 43-character alphanumeric string.
More at https://riot.im.
Carbonos
Carbonos is an in-development distro written by Adrian Vovk. Like Fedora Silverblue and the beginnerfocussed Endless OS, the distro uses Ostree for atomic updates. This makes upgrading or rolling back a simple and safe process. Currently only Flatpak packages are supported, and this is likely to be the preferred package format as things evolve. A desktop based on the Wayfire Wayland compositor is in development too.
See https://bitbucket.org/carbonos.
Kali LINUX 2019.1
Kali Linux, our favourite penetration testing and security distro, celebrates its first release of 2019. Besides general package and kernel 4.19.13 updates, the main fanfare heralds Metasploit 5.0. This considerable update brings database and automation APIS, as well as advanced new antivirus-evading abilities. In fact, there’s a whole new evasion module so pen-testers can add in their own subterfuge techniques. New versions of the Dbeaver database tool and theharvester (which gathers digital footprints from the web) also feature. Bop on over to https://kali.org.