News briefs from October 8, 2018.

Linux 4.19-rc7 was released yesterday. Greg KH says it's a bigger release than rc6 was, with networking fixes and lots of driver subsystem fixes. It also looks like there will be an -rc8 next week "just to be sure 4.19 is solid".

Calculate Linux version 18 was announced yesterday. In this version, "Calculate Utilities were ported to Qt5, your network is managed in a different way, and binary packages get checked using their index signature". See the announcement for more details. You can download LiveUSB images here.

The Linux Code of Conduct may see changes with the upcoming 4.19 kernel release, Phoronix reports. James Bottomley submitted a couple fixes over the weekend, and Geert Uytterhoeven submitted a patch as well.

The Emmabuntus Collective yesterday announced the release of Emmabuntus Debian Edition 2 1.03, based on Debian 9.5 and featuring the XFCE desktop environment. This distro was "designed to facilitate the reconditioning of computers donated to humanitarian organizations, starting with the Emmaüs communities (which is where the distribution's name obviously comes from), to promote the discovery of GNU/Linux by beginners, as well as to extend the lifespan of computer hardware in order to reduce the waste induced by the overconsumption of raw materials".

There has been a "veritable flood of improvement throughout KDE's software stack over the past few days", Nate Graham writes in his Adventures in Linux and KDE blog. See the post for details on all the new features, UI improvements and bug fixes.