News digest for January, 15, 2018.

Just released on 1-14-2018: the 4.15-rc8 Linux kernel. You can view the commit diff here, and more information is available from The Linux Kernel Archives.

The popular Linux Kernel Mailing List website is back online after going down and staying down for several days due to a power outage to the home server where it was hosted. Upon reboot, a password (for dm-crypt) was required to mount the root device; however, that in itself was not the problem. The problem was the fact that the PC’s owner, Jasper, was on vacation when all of this occurred. Anyway, the site is now back up and continuing to operate as it always has.

Speaking of the kernel mailing lists, Johannes Weiner issued a call for proposals for agenda topics to the upcoming annual 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem and Memory Management (LSF/MM) Summit. The deadline is January 31, 2018, and the summit will be held between April 23-25 At Deer Valley Lodges in Park City, Utah. For more information, visit the Linux Foundation Events page.

Major Linux distributions are continuing to work hard pushing updates and patches to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. If you are unfamiliar with these two very critical issues, please familiarize yourself with this link, and be sure to update your distribution ASAP. Officially, the fixes will be back-ported to the 4.14, 4.9 and 4.4 long-term supported Linux kernels, although some of the major distributions will continue to back-port the fixes to some of the much older kernels used in their respective long-term supported operating system releases. You can follow the various distributions' feeds to get the latest status on this.

With its goal already reached, the Kickstarter campaign to fund the open-source mobile operating system, eelo, has four days left before concluding. Eelo is a resin and, in some cases, a re-engineered implementation of Android, with an emphasis on user privacy.

Late last week, the city of Barcelona announced that it will be replacing its existing Microsoft systems and proprietary software with Linux and open-source software. They are in the process of migrating as we speak. The primary aim of the city was to avoid spending a large sum of money on licensing costs and services and be less dependent to single vendors and suppliers.