~lwn | Bookmarks (379)

Version 2.0 of the Vanilla OS image-based Linux distribution has been released. Dubbed "Orchid", Vanilla OS is now based on Debian Sid (prior versions were Ubuntu-based), allows creation of customized Linux environments, support for running Android applications using Waydroid, and many other improvements.

A few years ago, PyGObject—the Python package that provides bindings for GTK and GNOME applications—was not faring particularly well. Several maintainers had left the project and its development was not keeping pace with changes in GTK. At this year's GUADEC, Dan Yeaw presented a talk about the project's decline, improvements in the last year, and his experience getting involved in an undermaintained project.

Version 8.0 of the Forgejo software-development platform has been released. Notable changes include the removal of non-free software found in the codebase, improved stability, and a reduction in "seemingly random User Interface changes": A gentle way of describing Forgejo User eXperience is that it is an acquired taste: it grew over the years, driven by the inspiration of the person with the keyboard in...

A bootstrappable build is one that builds existing software from scratch — for example, building GCC without relying on an existing copy of GCC. In 2023, the Guix project announced that the project had reduced the size of the binary bootstrap seed needed to build its operating system to just 357-bytes — not counting the Linux kernel required to run the build process. Now,...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland), Red Hat (freeradius, freeradius:3.0, git-lfs, httpd, kernel, openssh, and varnish:6), SUSE (cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, git, gtk2, gtk3, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t, orc, postgresql14, python-dnspython, python-urllib3, shadow, and xen), and Ubuntu (openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, and python3.10, python3.8).

At the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, John Groves led a session on famfs, which is a filesystem he has developed that uses the kernel's direct-access (DAX) mechanism to access memory that is shareable between hosts. The discussion was aimed at whether a different approach should be taken and, in particular, whether FUSE should be used instead of implementing as...

Daniel Robbins, founder of the Gentoo Linux distribution and its spinoff Funtoo Linux, has announced that he has decided to end the Funtoo project: Funtoo started as a philosophy to create a fun community of contributors building something great together. For me, it's no longer that so I need to move on to other things. There is not a successor BDFL for Funtoo nor...

At GUADEC in Denver, Colorado on July 21, the GNOME Foundation held its annual general meeting (AGM) to provide updates from the foundation's board and committees. Topics included work accomplished in the past year, challenges facing the GNOME Foundation–including fundraising and finding a new executive director–and some insight into plans for the next year. And last, but not least, the awarding of the Pants of...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (curl), Mageia (virtualbox), Oracle (squid), Red Hat (kernel), SUSE (apache2, bind, cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, devscripts, espeak-ng, freerdp, ghostscript, gnome-shell, gtk2, gtk3, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kubevirt, libgit2, openssl-3, orc, p7zip, python-dnspython, and shadow), and Ubuntu (kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-ibm, linux-nvidia, linux-oem-6.8, linux-raspi, linux,...

Version 2.46.0 of the Git source-code management system has been released. This release seems to consist of a long list of interface and performance improvements rather than big new features; see the announcement for the details.

The release of 6.11-rc1 marked the end of the 6.11 merge window on July 28. By that time, 12,102 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository; about 8,000 of those came in after the first-half summary was written. Quite a few significant changes were to be found in those changesets; there is also one big change that did not make it.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-11-openjdk), Debian (bind9), Fedora (darkhttpd, mod_http2, and python-scrapy), Red Hat (python3.11, rhc-worker-script, and thunderbird), SUSE (assimp, gh, opera, python-Django, and python-nltk), and Ubuntu (edk2, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-nvidia-6.5, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, and lua5.4).

Linus Torvalds has released 6.11-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle. "The merge window felt pretty normal, and the stats all look pretty normal too. I was expecting things to be quieter because of summer vacations, but that (still) doesn't actually seem to have been the case." Note that the extensible scheduler class ("sched_ext") was not merged, even though Torvalds had...

The 6.10.2, 6.9.12, 6.6.43, 6.1.102, 5.15.164, 5.10.223, 5.4.281, and 4.19.319 stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains a relatively small set of important fixes, at least one of which appears to close a minor security hole.