Dell's XPS 13 Developer Edition with Ubuntu 18.04 Preinstalled Now Available, GCC Conversion to Git Update, Lubuntu Shifts Focus, OpenMW Team Releases Version 0.44.0 and Serverless Inc Announces New Framework and Gateway

News briefs for July 30, 2018.

Dell's XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS preinstalled is now available. According to Canonical's blog post, this launch marks the "the first availability of Ubuntu's latest LTS on a major OEM's hardware since its release in April. Canonical and Dell have worked together to certify Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the XPS 13 to ensure a seamless experience from first use." You can purchase one in the US via Dell.com, and they will be available in Europe in early August.

The GCC conversion from Subversion to Git is not going well, and the problem is more complex than Eric S. Raymond needing more RAM as he originally thought. According to the story on Phoronix regarding the conversion, Raymond said, "that light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be an oncoming train." He went on to say "The GCC repo is just too large and weird...My tools need to get a lot faster, like more than an order of magnitude faster, before digging out of the bad situation the conversion is now in will be practical. Hardware improvements won't do that. Nobody knows how to build a machine that can crank a single process enough faster than 1.3GHz. And the problem doesn't parallelize."

The Lubuntu Linux distro is shifting from being an OS for older PCs to a modular and modern one. Softpedia News quotes Lubuntu developer Simon Quigley as saying "We decided that going forward, we need to adapt for the current state of the market." He also stated that Lubuntu would be a "functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer".

The OpenMW team announces the release of version 0.44.0 of the "free, open source and modern" Morrowind engine. The new release brings several bug fixes and new features, including "a search bar for spells, a tab for advanced settings in the launcher, and multiple quicksaves." You can download it from here, and also view the release commentary video.

Serverless, Inc, has announced a $10 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Ventures, TechCrunch reports. In addition, the company also announced the release of the Serverless Platform, including the Serverless Framework, Serverless Dashboard and Serverless Gateway: "the Framework lets developers set up their serverless code across different cloud platforms and set conditions on the deployment such as function rules and infrastructure dependencies." The framework and gateway are open source, and the company will charge for "use of the dashboard to get insights into their serverless code or to access a hosted version of the gateway". You can host your own version of the gateway via the open-source version of the product.

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.

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