News briefs for July 6, 2018.
The Dell Precision 7530 and 7730 Mobile Workstation Developer Editions are now available via Dell's online store with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled, Softpedia News[1] reports. The Mobile Workstations are powered by the latest Intel Core or Xeon processors, and "feature blazing-fast RAM, professional AMD or Nvidia graphics cards, and are certified for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 operating system". Prices for the "world's most powerful 15" and 17" laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed" begin at $1,091.14 for the 7530 and $1,371.37 for the 7730.
Linux Ultimate Gamers Edition launched its 5.8 ISO, which you can download from SourceForge or Softpedia. Ultimate Gamers is based on Debian and Ubuntu, with the MATE desktop environment. According to the Appuals post[2], "it comes with out-of-the-box support for nearly any kind of multimedia file that a gamer would ever want to play....It also comes with dozens of applications gamers and A/V fans will need. Most importantly, it comes with Wine pre-loaded, which is extremely important for those who want to run popular online games."
Feral Interactive's GameMode is coming soon to Fedora Linux, Phoronix reports[3]. GameMode is "a new open-source project that provides a Linux system tuning daemon for optimizing the system's configuration for gaming when firing up Linux games while reverting to stock behavior when outside of supported games". Phoronix notes that it has been working its way into various Linux distros' package management systems, and that as of today it "has been submitted as the newest package for Fedora Rawhide as the development version ultimately leading to Fedora 29."
CentOS announced the availability of CentOS Linux 6.10[4]. In this release GCC now supports retpolines for Spectre variant 2 mitigation. See the release notes[5] for all the changes.
Canonical has released new kernel security updates for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver),