Linux Action News 45

Gnome's new tricks, our favorite thing about the Raspberry Pi 3B+, Eric Raymond's call for an open source UPS, and the US city that banned Bitcoin mining.

Plus Let's Encrypt rolls out wildcard certs, Firefox 59's new Linux feature, and why Wil Wheaton switched to Debian.

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• GNOME 3.28 Released — One major new feature for this release is automatic downloading of operating systems in Boxes, which takes the work out of creating and running virtual machines – just pick the operating system that you want to create a virtual machine of, and Boxes will now download and install it for you.
• GNOME 3.28 Release Notes
• Firefox 59 released — We launched an entirely new engine in November, made significant improvements to graphics rendering in January, and are continuing to post performance gains and add features with this release. On Firefox for desktop, we’ve improved page load times, added tools to annotate and crop your Firefox Screenshots, and made it easier to arrange your Top Sites on the Firefox Home page. On Firefox for Android, we’ve added support for sites that stream video using the HLS protocol.
• Firefox is a Snap
• Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ — Alongside a 200MHz increase in peak CPU clock frequency, we have roughly three times the wired and wireless network throughput, and the ability to sustain high performance for much longer periods.
• US city bans new Bitcoin mining — Plattsburgh, New York has imposed an 18-month moratorium on Bitcoin mining to prevent miners from using all the city’s cheap electricity.
• Let’s Encrypt rolls out wildcard certs — Free "wildcard" certificates to enable secure HTTP connections for entire domains. In addition to a new version of the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol, an interface that can be used by a variety of client software packages to automate verification of certificate requests.
• TechSNAP Episode 359
• Eric Raymond's open source UPS — Last week, ESR opened up the work-in-progress on GitLab: the Upside project is currently defining requirements and developing a specification for a “high quality UPS that can be built from off-the-shelf parts in any reasonably well-equipped makerspace or home electronics shop”.
• Wil Wheaton runs Linux — But about a week ago, something went wrong. Everything started slowing down like crazy, Chrome just quit working entirely, and even Firefox ran so slow, I felt like I was using a 386.