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Distro watch
OPINION

MONADO
What’s behind the free software sofa? TAGGED
ZORIN OS 15.2
The newest version of this Ubuntu-based distro has
been released. As the release announcement (which
can be read at http://bit.ly/LXF262Zorin) states, this
new release focuses on “refining the foundation of Zorin
OS: its core technologies and software stack”, which Jakob Bornecrantz
should make for a faster, more secure and better is a senior software engineer
performing experience. The Linux kernel is now 5.3 at Collabora
(which comes with new security patches), and there’s
better hardware support, including AMD Navi GPUs, Zorin is a user-friendly distro aimed at
10th gen Intel processors and MacBook keyboards. newcomers to Linux. Some good things
have happened recently in the
land of Monado, the OpenXR
GOBOLINUX 017-ALPHA runtime for Linux. Ever since
This independently developed distro, which has the announcing it at GDC 2019,
lofty ambition of redefining the UNIX filesystem we have been working at
hierarchy into a database-like format, now has a new improving the full open source
preview out. This alpha snapshot’s primary goal is to XR stack to a usable state,
test out the new boot process and installer. While there and recently we have finally
are some outdated packages included, Python 2 has been able to tag version 0.1.
been depreciated, and all GoboLinux tools have been While this is only a first
ported to Python 3. You can find out more at: tag, it is a very significant
http://bit.ly/LXF262Gobo. milestone nonetheless.
GoboLinux is still in its early stages, but Along with this tag, there
it’s certainly a promising distro. have been a number of
noteworthy additions to the
project in recent months.
ELIVE 3.8.4 (BETA) Notably, the Project North
A new snapshot of this Debian-based live CD distro has Star driver, made by Nova,
been released. Based on Debian 10 “Buster”, this has been merged. This is for
version comes with updates to the kernel (now 5.4.8) an open source optical see-
and numerous fixes as well. According to the release through AR headset that
statement (http://bit.ly/LXF262Elive), the Debian supports positional tracking
base system has been updated to 10.3, and there are using the Intel RealSense
fixes to Thunar notifications, Conky and NVMe disk T265 tracker, which lives in a
support, among others. separate driver and can be
Elive is billed as a “fast, beautiful and reused. We have also made
powerful OS”. good progress on packaging.
Of course there are a lot of
other things going on,
ANDROID-X86 9.0-R1 including researching the
Version 9.0 of this unofficial port of Google’s Android libsurvive driver and looking
operating system for mobile devices has now been into further supporting
released. This project brings Android to standard lighthouse tracking in
computers with the x86 architecture, and this is the Monado, continued work on
first stable release based on Android “Pie”. This update the PSVR and PS Move
supports 64-bit and 32-bit kernels, OpenGL ES 3.x positional tracking, Wayland
hardware acceleration for a variety of GPUs and a text- support in the compositor,
based GUI installer. You can find out more about this and more.
project at http://bit.ly/LXF262Androidx86. Feel free to play around
with Monado and hit us up
on our Discord if you want to
get help, report any bugs you
This project brings Android to standard may encounter or even to ask
PCs – unofficially, of course. about the possibility
of contributing.

www.techradar.com/pro/linux May 2020 LXF262 9