Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1070640/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, giflib, grafana, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, LibRaw, OpenEXR, PackageKit, pcs, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, sudo, tigervnc, vim, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (calibre, firefox-esr, and openjdk-17), Fedora (asterisk, binaryen, buildah, dokuwiki, lemonldap-ng, libexif, libgcrypt, miniupnpd, openvpn, podman, python3.9, rust-rpm-sequoia, skopeo, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Red Hat (buildah, gdk-pixbuf2, and nodejs:20), SUSE (dnsdist, libheif, openCryptoki, polkit, sed, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux-bluefield, python-marshmallow, and roundcube).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1070434/

SUSE’s Security Team has published a detailed
blog post on their recent review of the Plasma
Login Manager version 6.6.2,
which was forked from the SDDM display
manager.

While most of the code remains the
same, the new upstream added a privileged
D-Bus helper called
plasmaloginauthhelper, which suffers from defense-in-depth
security issues.

[…] Based on the high severity of the defense-in-depth issues
shown in this report, our assessment is that there is effectively no
separation between root and the plasmalogin service user account.

At this time there is no bugfix available by upstream, but a
security fix is planned for the next Plasma release on May 12. We have
not been involved in upstream’s bugfix process so far and have no
knowledge about the approach that will be taken to address the issues
from this report.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1070428/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, java-17-openjdk, libxml2, python3, python3.11, python3.12, sudo, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (dnsdist, node-tar, pdns, pdns-recursor, and policykit-1), Fedora (chromium, edk2, and vim), Oracle (firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, go-toolset:rhel8, libpng12, LibRaw, libxml2, python, python3, python3.11, python3.12, python3.12-wheel, vim, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, delve, git-lfs, go-rpm-macros, grafana, grafana-pcp, osbuild-composer, and rhc), SUSE (bouncycastle, clamav, container-suseconnect, dovecot22, erlang, firefox, fontforge, freerdp2, ghostscript, giflib, gnome-remote-desktop, go1.25, go1.26, google-guest-agent, haproxy, ignition, ImageMagick, kernel, libcap, libpng16, libraw, librsvg, mariadb, openexr, pocketbase, protobuf, python-Pillow, python-requests, qemu, rust1.94, sudo, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, webkit2gtk3, and xen), and Ubuntu (dotnet10, dovecot, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, node-follow-redirects, openssh, packagekit, python-cryptography, python-tornado, ruby-rack-session, ujson, and wheel).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1070213/

LWN has received the sad news that Seth Nickell passed away, on
April 16, from his father, Eric Nickell:

Many of you knew Seth from his work in the GNOME Usability Project, but his
roots in that community trace back to his high school years. As a father of
a high school junior, I remember being terrified when he flashed the hard
drive of a computer he purchased for himself with this weird “Linux” thing.
And I was a bit awed by the college application essay he wrote about open
source and Linus Torvalds.

It was his interest in packet radio that drew him into working with
the Linux AX.25 HOWTO
as a high schooler, and from there to his focus on making the Linux
desktop work for everyone.

The family plans to share news of a memorial at a later time. He
will be deeply missed.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1070198/

The Fedora Project has announced
the release of Fedora Linux 44. There are “what’s new”
articles for Fedora
Workstation, Fedora
KDE Plasma Desktop, and Fedora
Atomic Desktops. The Fedora Asahi Remix for Apple Silicon Macs,
based on Fedora 44, is also
available. See the Fedora Spins page for a full list of alternative desktop options.

Fedora Linux 44 Workstation ships with the latest GNOME release,
GNOME 50. This comes with a long list of refinements to your desktop,
including everything from accessibility to color management and remote
desktop. Many of the applications that are installed by default on
Fedora Workstation have also seen improvements, from Document Viewer
to File Manager and Calendar. To learn more about these and other
changes, you can read the GNOME 50 release notes.

KDE Plasma Desktop: If you are a KDE user, you should also notice a
couple of very obvious changes. Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 is based
on the latest Plasma 6.6, which includes the new Plasma Login Manager
and Plasma Setup to provide a more cohesive and integrated experience
from the moment the computer is powered on for the first time. The
installation process has been simplified, enabling you to easily set
up Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop for a computer for a friend or a loved
one.

The release
notes include important changes between Fedora 43 and
Fedora 44 for desktop users, developers, and system administrators.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1069368/

There are dozens of music-player applications for Linux; the options range
from bare-bones programs that only play local files to full-blown
music-management projects with a full suite of tools for managing (and playing)
a music collection. Strawberry
is in the latter category; it has a bumper crop of features, including smart
playlists, support for editing music metadata tags, the ability to organize music
files, and more.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1070185/

We have received the sad news that Tomáš Kalibera, a member of the
R Project core team, has
passed away
after a short illness.

A friend who knew him well wrote to me: he was very happy, and
his work fulfilled him. That is, perhaps, the best thing one can
say about a life in open source — that the work mattered, that it
reached millions, and that the person who did it found meaning in it.

Kalibera was mentioned in this 2019 article about C
programs passing strings to Fortran subroutines. He will be greatly
missed.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1070094/

FOSDEM’s organizers have announced
that all of the video recordings “worth publishing” from FOSDEM 2026 are now available.

Videos are linked from the individual schedule pages for the talks and
the full
schedule page. They are also available, organised by room, at
video.fosdem.org/2026.

LWN’s coverage
of talks from FOSDEM 2026 can be found on our conference
index.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1070184/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-21 and webkit2gtk), Fedora (botan3, chromium, cockpit, firefox, flatpak, gum, libarchive, libcoap, mingw-python3, ngtcp2, nss, openssh, openssl, openvpn, PackageKit, python3-docs, python3.11, python3.12, python3.13, python3.14, vim, and xrdp), Oracle (firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, python3.12, python3.9, sudo, and tigervnc), Red Hat (tigervnc and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (mpg123 and proftpd), SUSE (emacs, firefox, fontforge, freeciv, freerdp, libngtcp2-16, libsystemd0, and strongswan), and Ubuntu (authd, clamav, glance, haproxy, jq, lcms2, nginx, nltk, ntfs-3g, packagekit, pillow, strongswan, and vim).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1070010/

Version 26.1 of
the pip package installer for Python has been released. Richard Si
has published a blog
post that looks at some of the highlights of 26.1 including
dependency cooldowns, experimental support for pylock (pylock.toml)
files, and resolver
improvements that will move pip closer to the goal of removing its
legacy resolver. The release also includes several security fixes and
drops support for Python 3.9.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1069965/

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.2, 6.18.25, 6.12.84, and 6.6.136 stable kernels. As usual, each
contains important fixes throughout; users are advised to upgrade.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1069951/

David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for
PostgreSQL, has archived
the project and announced that it is no longer being maintained.

After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did
not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for
the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship for
much of this time, but there were also many late nights and weekends as I worked
to make pgBackRest the project it is today, aided by numerous
contributors. Every open-source developer knows exactly what I mean and how much
of your life gets devoted to a special project.

Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking
for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not
been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far
short of what I need to make the project viable.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1069944/

Jon Seager, VP engineering for Canonical, has posted
an update on “what Canonical and Ubuntu will do (or not) to
incorporate AI” that explains what part AI will play in the future
of the company and its distribution.

The bottom line is that Canonical is ramping up its use of AI tools
in a focused and principled manner that favours open weight models
with license terms that feel most compatible with our values, combined
with open source harnesses. AI features will be landing in Ubuntu
throughout the next year as we feel that they’re of sufficient
maturity and quality, with a bias toward local inference by
default.

AI features in Ubuntu features will come in two forms: first as a
means of enhancing existing OS functionality with AI models in the
background, and latterly in the form of “AI native” features and
workflows for those who want them.

This year Canonical has begun a more deliberate push toward
education and developing competence with AI tools. We are not setting
shallow metrics on token usage, or percentages of code written with
AI, but rather incentivising engineers to experiment and understand
where AI tools add value. Rather than force a single early-choice AI
stack, we’re incentivising teams to each pick ‘something different’
and go deep, so we learn more as an org in the next six months.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1069939/

Version 26.04
of the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor has been released. The most
notable change in this release, as the “most requested niri feature by far“,
is support for the blur effect using the Wayland protocol’s ext-background-effect. This
release also features optional configuration
includes, screencasting support enhancements, and a number of improvements for
input devices.

In short, background blur turned out to be a massive undertaking. Not because of
the blur algorithm itself (by the way, if you want to learn about different blurs,
including the widely used Dual Kawase, I highly recommend this blog post), but because window
background effects in general required a lot of thinking and additions to the code,
especially to make them as efficient as possible. This is one of the most complex
niri features thus far.

LWN covered niri in July
2025.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1069938/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-25-openjdk, kernel, osbuild-composer, thunderbird, webkit2gtk3, and wireshark), Debian (chromium, distro-info-data, libde265, mbedtls, and thunderbird), Fedora (awstats, bind9-next, bpfman, buildah, calibre, cef, chromium, composer, corosync, coturn, cups, curl, dnsdist, doctl, erlang, fido-device-onboard, flatpak-builder, freetype, glab, goose, jq, kea, libarchive, libcap, libcgif, libgsasl, libinput, libmicrohttpd, libpng, libpng12, libpng15, mapserver, mbedtls, micropython, minetest, mingw-exiv2, mingw-libpng, mingw-LibRaw, mingw-openexr, mingw-python3, moby-engine, mupdf, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, opam, openbao, opensc, openssh, openssl, opkssh, perl-Net-CIDR-Lite, pgadmin4, pie, podman, pspp, pypy, python-biopython, python-cairosvg, python-cbor2, python-cryptography, python-flask-httpauth, python-msal, python-pillow, python-pydicom, python-tomli, python3-docs, python3.13, python3.14, python3.15, python3.9, rauc, roundcubemail, rpki-client, rust-sccache, skopeo, smb4k, stb, sudo, tcpflow, thunderbird, tigervnc, tinyproxy, trafficserver, trivy, usd, util-linux, vim, xdg-dbus-proxy, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and yarnpkg), Oracle (buildah, golang, grafana, java-17-openjdk, and java-25-openjdk), and SUSE (chromium, cockpit-podman, coredns, corosync, cups, dnsdist, flatpak, freerdp2, frr, gdk-pixbuf, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, google-guest-agent, haproxy, ignition, ImageMagick, kernel, kyverno, libcap, libminizip1, libpng16, librsvg, libXpm-devel, Mesa, opensc, openssl-3, ovmf-202602, PackageKit, podman, python-ecdsa, python-pillow, python311-Mako, sudo, thunderbird, tomcat, tomcat10, and vim).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1069552/

Werner Koch has announced
the release of GnuPG 2.5.19. This release includes a few new options
and a number of bug fixes, and comes with the reminder that the
GnuPG 2.4 series will reach end-of-life soon

The main features in the 2.5 series are improvements for 64 bit Windows
and the introduction of Kyber (aka ML-KEM or FIPS-203) as PQC encryption
algorithm. Other than PQC support the 2.6 series will not differ a lot
from 2.4 because the majority of changes are internal to make use of
newer features from the supporting libraries.

Note that the old 2.4 series reaches end-of-life in just two months.
Thus update to 2.5.19 in time. As always with GnuPG new versions are
fully compatible with previous versions.

LWN recently
covered Fedora’s discussion about what to offer after GnuPG 2.4 is no
longer supported.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1069549/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (anaconda, dnf5, firefox, flatpak-builder, libexif, minetest, nss, plasma-setup, python-blivet, rpki-client, and xorg-x11-server), Oracle (bind, kernel, osbuild-composer, thunderbird, webkit2gtk3, and wireshark), Red Hat (java-25-openjdk), SUSE (cacti, cacti, cacti-spine, cockpit-machines, cockpit-podman, cockpit-tukit, csync2, flannel, gdk-pixbuf, go1.25-openssl, go1.26-openssl, haproxy, kernel, libcap, libpng16, libtree-sitter0_26, libvirt, ncurses, ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, openvswitch, perl, python-pyOpenSSL, python311, rclone, sudo, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-bad1.0, jq, libopenmpt, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, and php-league-commonmark).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1069399/

Ubuntu 26.04 (“Resolute Raccoon”) LTS has been released
on schedule.

This release brings a significant uplift in security, performance,
and usability across desktop, server, and cloud environments. Ubuntu
26.04 LTS introduces TPM-backed full-disk encryption, expanded use of
memory-safe components, improved application permission controls, and
Livepatch support for Arm systems, helping reduce downtime and
strengthen system resilience. […]

The newest Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon,
Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity, and Xubuntu are also being
released today. For more details on these, read their individual release
notes under the Official flavors section:

https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/26.04/#official-flavors

Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu
Server, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu WSL, and Ubuntu Core. All the remaining flavors
will be supported for 3 years.

See the release
notes for a list of changes, system requirements, and more.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1069356/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and osbuild-composer), Debian (cpp-httplib, firefox-esr, gimp, and packagekit), Fedora (chromium, composer, libcap, pgadmin4, pie, python3-docs, python3.14, and sudo), Mageia (gvfs), Oracle (.NET 8.0, delve, freerdp, giflib, ImageMagick, kernel, OpenEXR, and osbuild-composer), SUSE (erlang, giflib, google-guest-agent, GraphicsMagick, ignition, imagemagick, kea, kernel, kissfft, libraw, libssh, ocaml-patch, opam, openCryptoki, openexr, openssl-1_1, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, and tor), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4,
linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm,
linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.17, linux-hwe-6.17, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.17, linux-azure, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-raspi, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-raspi-realtime, packagekit, python-tornado, ruby-rack-session, slurm-llnl, and strongswan).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1067989/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: LLMs and Python bugs; scheduler regression; new Rust traits; dependency cooldowns; 7.1 merge window; Shor’s algorithm; drama at The Document Foundation.
• Briefs: Firefox zero-days; kernel code removal; reproduceible Arch; Debian election; Firefox 150; Forgejo 15.0; Git 2.54.0; KDE Gear 26.04; LillyPond 2.26.0; Rust 1.95.0; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.