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Endless OS is a Linux distribution with a focus on improving access to educational tools by providing a simple-to-manage, full-featured desktop for educators and students — one that works offline, with minimal maintenance. The distribution also aims to be suitable for older devices, in order to promote access to computers by ensuring those systems remain usable. In pursuit of those goals, it makes some...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freeradius and freeradius:3.0), Debian (chromium, odoo, and roundcube), Fedora (microcode_ctl, mingw-qt5-qtbase, mingw-qt6-qtbase, opentofu, orc, python-setuptools, and vim), Gentoo (Nokogiri), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, kernel, krb5, libtiff, python-setuptools, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), SUSE (python-Django), and Ubuntu (krb5).

Mozilla has announced that Puppeteer, a browser automation and testing library, now has first-class support for Firefox using the WebDriver BiDi protocol. Puppeteer can be used to drive headless browser instances, and is commonly used for automated end-to-end web-site tests. Whilst the features offered by Puppeteer won't be a surprise, bringing support to multiple browsers has been a significant undertaking. The Firefox support is...

The desire for the ability to checkpoint a process — to record its state in a form that can be restarted at a future time — on Linux is almost as old as Linux itself. See, for example, this announcement of a checkpoint project that appeared in LWN in 1998. While working solutions exist, they can be somewhat fragile and difficult to use; it...

There are lots of places in the kernel where an EINVAL can be returned to user space, but it is often unclear what the actual underlying problem is because the errno error codes are too generic. That is the problem that Miklos Szeredi wanted to discuss in a filesystem session that he led remotely at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, openjdk-17, and wpa), Gentoo (aiohttp, Bitcoin, Cairo, Go, json-c, Levenshtein, libXpm, nghttp2, PostgreSQL, and Redis), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, python-setuptools, python-urllib3, python3.11-setuptools, and wget), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (bind, curl, docker, ffmpeg, ffmpeg-4, kernel, kernel-firmware, libnbd, patch, shadow, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (python-django and wpa).

CircuitPython is an open-source implementation of the Python programming language for microcontroller boards. The project, which is sponsored by Adafruit Industries, is designed with new programmers in mind, but it also has many features that may be of interest to more-experienced developers. The recent 9.1.0 release adds a few minor features, but it follows just a few months after CircuitPython 9.0.0, which brings some more significant...

Version 129.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include some improvements to the reader mode, tab previews, and use of HTTPS by default.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libreoffice), Gentoo (containerd and firefox), Red Hat (httpd), SUSE (ca-certificates-mozilla, ksh, openssl-3-livepatches, podman, python-Twisted, and skopeo), and Ubuntu (imagemagick).

David Howells wanted to discuss changing the way filesystem code handles the ability to interrupt or kill operations, in order to fix some longstanding problems with network (and other) filesystems, in a session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. As noted in his session proposal, some filesystems may be expecting to not be interruptible, but are calling code can...

The Business Source License (BUSL) is a source-available license that "converts" to an open-source license after a period of time. In theory, this means that a few years after a version of a product is released under the BUSL, it becomes open source and is fair game for Linux distributions to package along with regular open-source projects. In practice, the license throws a few...

Version 2.43 of the GNU Binutils package is out. Changes include some improvements to the assembler and the linker, better support for hardware event counters in the Gprofng profiler, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-11), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, chromium, ffmpeg, hostapd, trafficserver, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (curl and linux-oem-6.5).

Linus has released 6.11-rc2 for testing. "Hopefully we've gotten rid of the bulk of the silly noise here in rc2, and not added too much new noise, so that we can get on with the process of finding more meaningful issues."

The 6.10.3, 6.6.44, and 6.1.103 stable kernel updates have all been released. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the tree. Users of those kernels should upgrade.

There is ongoing discussion about the ethics and effectiveness of telemetry following some recent LWN articles that touched on Thunderbird's use of opt-out telemetry and planned metrics in Fedora. The Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt, has a potential solution to the problem of how to collect and aggregate telemetry without violating users' privacy. The scheme is based on a...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium), SUSE (docker and patch), and Ubuntu (bind9, gross, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.5, and tomcat8, tomcat9).

The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has announced a fellowship program to support "the dedicated individuals who keep our digital infrastructure running": Over the past two years, STF has successfully contracted over 40 FOSS projects, enhancing their technical sustainability through targeted milestones. However, the activities of maintainers, who often work on multiple FOSS projects, are hard to quantify for funding applications, as the demands and...

Like many projects written in C, the kernel makes extensive use of the C preprocessor; indeed, the kernel's use is rather more extensive than most. The preprocessor famously has a number of sharp edges associated with it. One might not normally think of increased compilation time as one of them, though. It turns out that some changes to a couple of conceptually simple preprocessor...

We have received the sad news that Dr. Mel Chua has passed away. Mel was probably best known in the free-software community as a contributor to the Fedora Project in its early days. The Fedora Community blog honored Mel recently after she had moved to hospice care with tributes from several Fedorans. Stephen Jacobs wrote: I can't find the words to express how much...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (kernel, obs-cef, and xen), Mageia (emacs), Oracle (freeradius, freeradius:3.0, and kernel), Red Hat (emacs, httpd, and kpatch-patch-4_18_0-305_120_1), Slackware (curl), SUSE (apache2, cockpit-wicked, glibc, gnutls, gvfs, less, nghttp2, opensc, python-idna, python-requests, qemu, rpm, tpm2-0-tss, tpm2.0-tools, and unbound), and Ubuntu (clickhouse, exim4, libcommons-collections3-java, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, mysql-8.0, openssl, php-cas, prometheus-alertmanager, and snapd).

Arnd Bergmann has posted a detailed timeline for the deprecation of support for old Arm CPUs in both the kernel and the compiler toolchain. Anybody who is working with that hardware will likely want to review this list and let the relevant developers know if any of that support is still needed.