News briefs for May 9, 2019.

The Department of Justice recently concluded its review of IBM's Red Hat acquisition, which is still on track for later this year. ZDNet reports that Red Hat released the results of an IDC study at Red Hat Summit, "which concluded software and applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are expected to contribute to more than $10 trillion worth of global business revenues in 2019. That's about 5% of the worldwide economy for those of you following at home." ZDNet notes that "IBM's $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat is looking better than ever."

Distributed SQL database vendor NuoDB yesterday announced that its NuoDB Operator now has Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification and is available immediately on Red Hat OpenShift. From the press release: "The newly available NuoDB Operator easily configures and deploys the NuoDB Community Edition (CE), allowing users to build, run and manage a NuoDB database natively inside Red Hat OpenShift. Users also have the option to deploy the database with a sample SQL application that generates SQL activity on the database, allowing them to more quickly experience NuoDB in action. Users can then enable NuoDB Insights, a graphical dashboard that provides insight into the performance and overall health of the database, to learn how the sample database performed. Armed with this information, users can better understand, optimize and troubleshoot the database, making it easier to effectively evaluate NuoDB in Red Hat OpenShift."

Krita 4.2.0 alpha was released yesterday. Since Krita 4.1 was released last June, the team has fixed around 1500 bugs, and they've "implemented a host of new features, workflow improvements and little bits of spit and polish." New features include "much improved tablet support on all platforms, HDR painting on Windows, improved painting performance, improved color palette docker, animation API for scripting, gamut masks, improved artistic color selector, an improved start screen that can now show you the latest news about Krita, changes to the way flow and opacity work when painting". You can see the release notes here. The announcement says they are on track to release version 4.2 later this month.

Elive 3.0 has been updated, and this should be the last update before the 3.0 release. From Samuel F. Baggen's announcement: "in the last few months I have been deeply working on the next future versions of Elive, which will support things like Secure Boot and UEFI, with 64bit available builds and based in Debian Buster, all these things are simply...amazing! I hope to make the next beta versions publicly available soon with also including a working installer that will have extra features! I didn't wanted to publicly announce anything until now because I'm a meticulous perfectionist who wants to verify that most of the things are correctly working before giving any promise."

UBports yesterday announced the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-9. OTA-9 will roll out to supported Ubuntu Touch devices over the next few days. This release is mostly a stability release, but it includes a refreshed look, Nexus 5 camera fixes and the QQC2 Suru Style. You can read the full changelog here.

Fedora is planning a kernel 5.1 test week next week, which will run 5/13/2019 through 5/18/19. If you want to help test, see the wiki page for instructions.