Linux Mint Announces New MintBox Mini 2, Mozilla Plans to Add Ad Blocking to Firefox, Slax New Version and More

on March 26, 2018

News briefs for March 26, 2018.

Linux Mint recently announced the new MintBox Mini 2. The new Mini is "just as small as the original MintBox Mini and the MintBox Mini Pro but with much better specifications, better performance and a few more features". The new Mini 2 has an Intel 8260 chipset, which provides WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.2. You can upgrade the RAM to 16GB, and the device is easy to open. The front has two USB 3.0 ports, audio and micro jacks and a microSD slot, as well as two LEDs. The MintBox Mini 2 will be around the same price as the original MintBox Mini and is expected to be available worldwide in June 2018.

Mozilla announces its plans to add ad blocking to Firefox as part of its 2018 roadmap. Asa Dotzler, author of the Firefox Roadmap on the Mozilla Wiki outlines those goals, which include "taking a stand against tracking and intrusive ads", saying "People on the web deserve a browser that represents people first, a browser that isn't neutral when it comes to advertising, tracking and other dark patterns on the web."

Slax, the lightweight Debian-based distro, announced its first major update of 2018, version 9.4. See the release notes here.

Facebook has been collecting data from Android devices for years, including call history and SMS data, as reported on The Verge: "Several Twitter users have reported finding months or years of call history data in their downloadable Facebook data file. A number of Facebook users have been spooked by the recent Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, prompting them to download all the data that Facebook stores on their account. The results have been alarming for some." iOS devices apparently were not affected.

GNOME developer Yussuf Khalil discovered and resolved a bug in Clutter that was causing performance issues in GNOME, Phoronix reports. The fix has been merged for GNOME 3.30, and you can read more about it on Yussuf's merge request on GitHub.

Azul Systems announced "immediate availability of Zulu builds of OpenJDK supporting the Java SE 10 specification", according to a press release last week. Zulu v. 10 supports all major Linux distros and is free to download and use without restriction. For more info and to download Zulu, go here.

Jill Franklin is an editorial professional with more than 17 years experience in technical and scientific publishing, both print and digital. As Executive Editor of Linux Journal, she wrangles writers, develops content, manages projects, meets deadlines and makes sentences sparkle. She also was Managing Editor for TUX and Embedded Linux Journal, and the book Linux in the Workplace. Before entering the Linux and open-source realm, she was Managing Editor of several scientific and scholarly journals, including Veterinary Pathology, The Journal of Mammalogy, Toxicologic Pathology and The Journal of Scientific Exploration. In a previous life, she taught English literature and composition, managed a bookstore and tended bar. When she’s not bugging writers about deadlines or editing copy, she throws pots, gardens and reads.