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System76 has announced the fourth alpha release of its Rust-based COSMIC desktop. New features in this version include the ability to set default applications, region and language settings, a new Accessibility applet, as well as support for variable refresh rate (VRR) in the cosmic-comp compositor and the display settings tool. See the blog post for a full list of fixes and performance improvements. LWN...

It has long been said that naming things is one of the hard things to do in computer science. That may be so, but it pales in comparison to the challenge of handling usernames properly in applications. This is especially true when multiple applications are involved, and they are all supposed to agree on what characters are, and are not, allowed. The Debian project...

Mozilla would appear to have concluded that the solution to its problems is an extensive rebranding effort: We teamed up with global branding powerhouse Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR) to revamp our brand and revitalize our intentions across our entire ecosystem. At the heart of this transformation is making sure people know Mozilla for its broader impact, as well as Firefox. Our new brand strategy...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.12.2, 6.11.11, and 4.19.325 stable kernels. Note that both 6.11.11 and 4.19.325 are the last kernels in those series, "please move off to a newer kernel version". In the 4.19.325 release notice, he has a rather longer-than-usual message, including: As a "fun" proof that this one is finished (and that any company saying they care about it really should...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (thunderbird, tuned, and webkitgtk), Mageia (python-aiohttp and qemu), Oracle (container-tools:ol8, firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, kernel, kernel:4.18.0, krb5, pam, postgresql:16, python-tornado, python3:3.6.8, thunderbird, tigervnc, tuned, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (bzip2, postgresql, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, python-tornado, and ruby:3.1), Slackware (python3), SUSE (postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql17, postgresql13, postgresql14, postgresql15, python-python-multipart, and python3), and Ubuntu (python-django and recutils).

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller reports that the project's search to replace Pagure as its git forge is almost complete, with the Fedora Council strongly in favor of Forgejo: The Council, currently, has a clear preference for Forgejo. This is a big decision and we don't want it to feel rushed. Therefore, we're opening this up one last time to everyone's comments. After two...

Linus Walleij writes about a pair of security features for 32-bit Arm systems; these landed in 6.10, but, he says, have now stabilized to the point that distributors may want to enable them. PAN is an abbreviation for the somewhat grammatically incorrect Privileged Access Never. [...] For modern ARM32 systems with large memories configured to use LPAE nothing like PAN was available: this version...

Linux offers two broad ways of performing I/O to files. Buffered I/O, which is the usual way of accessing a file, stores a copy of the transferred data in the kernel's page cache to speed future accesses. Direct I/O, instead, moves data directly between the storage device and a user-space buffer, avoiding the page cache. Both modes have their advantages and disadvantages. In 2019,...

Version 6.0.0 of the Hurl command-line tool has been released. Hurl is a curl-powered utility that runs HTTP requests and tests defined in a plain-text Hurl file. Notable features in this release include the ability to generate dynamic values with functions, shorter syntax, and an option to export Hurl files to a list of curl commands. See the release notes for a full list...

Security updates have been issued by Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, grafana, kernel, kernel-rt, kernel:4.18.0, pam, pam:1.5.1, pcs, postgresql:12, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, python3:3.6.8, qemu-kvm, rhc, rhc-worker-playbook, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel) and SUSE (ansible-10, ansible-core, avahi, bpftool, python, python3, python36, webkit2gtk3, and xen).

The traditional structure of a compiler forms a pipeline — parsing, type-checking, optimization, and code-generation, usually in that order. But modern programming languages have requirements that are ill-suited to such a design. Increasingly, compilers are moving toward other designs in order to support incremental compilation and low-latency responses for uses like integration into IDEs. Rust has, for the last eight years, been pursuing a...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools:rhel8, kernel, kernel-rt:4.18.0, kernel:4.18.0, pam, pam:1.5.1, perl-App-cpanminus, perl-App-cpanminus:1.7044, python-tornado, tigervnc, tuned, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (needrestart and webkit2gtk), Mageia (firefox, glib2.0, krb5, and thunderbird), Red Hat (firefox, postgresql, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, and thunderbird), SUSE (editorconfig-core-c, kernel, php7, php8, python, python-tornado6, python3-virtualenv, python310, python39, thunderbird, wget, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (firefox and haproxy).

The most recent version of NixOS, 24.11, was released on November 30. It contains GNOME 47, Plasma 6.2, LLVM 19, and lots more: The 24.11 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2669 contributors, who authored 49079 commits since the previous release. Our thanks go the contributors who also take care of the continued stability and security of our stable release. NixOS is already known as the most up...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dnsmasq, editorconfig-core, lemonldap-ng, proftpd-dfsg, python3.9, simplesamlphp, tgt, and xfpt), Fedora (qbittorrent, webkitgtk, and wireshark), Mageia (libsoup3 & libsoup), Red Hat (buildah, grafana, grafana-pcp, and podman), SUSE (gimp, kernel, postgresql14, python, webkit2gtk3, xen, and zabbix), and Ubuntu (ansible and postgresql-12, postgresql-14, postgresql-16).

The 6.13 merge window closed with the release of 6.13-rc1 on December 1. By that time, 11,307 non-merge commits had been pulled into the mainline repository; about 9,500 of those landed after our first-half merge-window summary was written. There was a lot of new material in these patches, including architecture-support improvements, new BPF features, an efficient way to add guard pages to an address space,...