Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008137/

The Servo Rust-based rendering
engine project has published
an article summarizing its progress in 2024, and plans for the
future:

Servo main dependencies (SpiderMonkey, Stylo and WebRender) have been
upgraded, the new layout engine has kept evolving adding support for
floats, tables, flexbox, fonts, etc. By the end of 2024 Servo passes 1,515,229 WPT subtests (79%). Many other new features have been under
active development: WebGPU, Shadow DOM, ReadableStream, WebXR, … Servo
now supports two new platforms: Android and OpenHarmony. And we have
got the first experiments of applications using Servo as a web engine
(like Tauri,
Blitz, QtWebView,
Cuervo,
Verso and Moto).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006001/

Over the past year or so, LWN has added a number of useful new
features for our subscribers to enhance the experience of reading and
commenting on our content. Those features are of little use, however,
to readers who do not know about them. It has been more than a decade
since we last provided a
tour of the site—it seems that another is in
order. Walk this way for a look at the LWN kernel source database (KSDB),
enhanced commenting features, EPUB downloads, and more.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008051/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (fastd, ovn, and yq), Mageia (libreoffice), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (google-osconfig-agent, grafana, helm, and rime-schema-all), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-lowlatency, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-23, openjdk-8, and openjdk-lts).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007677/

Matthias Clasen has written a short update on a GTK hackfest that
took place at FOSDSEM and what’s
coming in GTK 4.18. This includes fixes for pointer sizes in Wayland
when fractional scaling is enabled, removal of the old GL renderer in
favor of the GL
renderer introduced in GTK
4.13.6, and deprecation of X11 and Broadway backends with intent
to remove them in GTK 5.

The deprecated backends will remain available until then, and no
action is required by developers at this time, Clasen wrote: “There
is no need to act on deprecations until you are actively porting your
app to the next major version of GTK, which is not on the horizon
yet“.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006916/

The election to replace outgoing openSUSE board members is
underway, with four candidates vying for three seats. The election was
initially scheduled to be completed in December, but the timeline was extended
due to too few candidates standing for the seats. Voting closes on
February 2 and the results are expected to be announced on
February 3.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006917/

The Thunderbird project has announced
that it is making its Release
channel the default download beginning with the 135.0 release in
March. This will move users to major monthly releases instead of the
annual major Extended Support Release (ESR) that is the current
default.

One of our goals for 2025 is to increase active installations on the
release channel to at least 20% of the total installations. At last
check, we had 29,543 active installations on the release channel,
compared to 20,918 on beta, and 5,941 on daily. The release channel
installations currently account for 0.27% of the 10,784,551 total
active installations tracked on stats.thunderbird.net.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006769/

Version 6.9 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Changes include a command to provide virtual machine memory dumps, ability to set network ACLs for instances on bridged networks, and more.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006622/

Ubuntu will be moving its “official realtime communications
channels” from IRC to Matrix, beginning March 1, 2025, following
a discussion
on the ubuntu-devel mailing list.

“Official” communication, such as making realtime requests of privileged
Ubuntu developer teams, could be expected to be actioned if requested on
Matrix only. Similarly, you can consider your social responsibility to
other developers in relation to your work in Ubuntu development to be
fulfilled if you are present on that platform. And Canonical will
follow in its requirement for its employed Ubuntu developers to be
present on that agreed platform during their working hours.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006677/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bzip2, gimp:2.8, keepalived, mariadb:10.11, mariadb:10.5, python-jinja2, and redis), Debian (iperf3, libtar, and pdns-recursor), Fedora (abseil-cpp, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, golang, libsoup3, and vaultwarden), Oracle (gimp:2.8, iperf3, keepalived, kernel, redis:7, and unbound), Red Hat (libsoup), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, go1.22, go1.23, iperf, java-21-openjdk, nginx, openvpn, and python311-asteval), and Ubuntu (kernel, libmicrodns, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe,
linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop,
linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg,
linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency,
linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15,
linux-raspi, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-gkeop,
linux-hwe-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia,
linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8,
linux-raspi, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-oem-6.11, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-ibm,
linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-oem-6.8, rsync, and tcpreplay).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006351/

This year’s edition of the Free and Open
Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) begins on
February 1 in Brussels. The event is widely regarded as one of
the most important open-source conferences. One of the reasons that
FOSDEM is held in high esteem by the community is its non-commercial
nature. It does accept sponsors, but
sponsorships come with few perks and no “pay-for-play” speaking
slots. Thus, the scheduling of a keynote by Jack
Dorsey⁠—⁠primarily known for his role in co-founding Twitter, and
currently CEO and chairman of FOSDEM sponsor Block, Inc.⁠—⁠raised eyebrows and led to plans for a protest. The
keynote has since been removed from the schedule, but there are still
a number of lingering questions.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005655/

The Go language is designed to make it
easy for developers to import other
Go packages and compile everything into a static binary
for simple distribution. Unfortunately, this complicates things for
those who package Go programs for Linux distributions, such as Fedora,
that have guidelines which require dependencies to be packaged
separately. Fedora’s Go special interest
group (SIG) is asking for relief and a loosening of the bundling
guidelines to allow Go packagers to bundle dependencies into the
packages that need them, otherwise known as vendoring. So far, the
participants in the discussion have seemed largely in favor of the
idea.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005838/

The FreeBSD Foundation
has announced that it has undertaken a project to deliver zero-trust
builds commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA).

The Zero-Trust Build project is scheduled from Jan-Aug 2025 and
centers on the FreeBSD build process, and in particular, release
building. The primary goal of this work is to enable the entire
release process to run without requiring root access, and that build
artifacts build reproducibly – that is, that a third party can build
bit-for-bit identical artifacts.

Additionally, the project aims to enhance build process
documentation, ensuring that release building is straightforward and
does not require specialized knowledge. The work is targeted for
completion prior to the release of FreeBSD 15.0.

The Foundation says that updates should not impact users of FreeBSD
release images, but it may have an impact on developers basing
projects or products on FreeBSD that make modifications to its release
process.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005332/

The computer mouse is a wonderful invention, but for the past few
months I’ve been working to use mine as little as possible for
productivity and ergonomic reasons. It should not be surprising that
there are quite a few open-source applications, utilities, and
configuration options that are either designed to or incidentally
assist in creating a keyboard-driven desktop. This includes tiling window
management with PaperWM, the Vimium browser extension, Input Remapper, and more.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005781/

The Vox Pupuli project has
announced the first release of OpenVox, a
“soft-fork” of the Puppet
automation framework. The intention to fork was announced
in December 2024.

OpenVox 8.11 is functionally equivalent to Puppet and should be a
drop-in replacement. Be aware, of course, that even though you can
type the same commands, use all the same modules and extensions, and
configure the same settings, OpenVox is not yet tested to the same
standard that Puppet is. […]

Please don’t use these packages on critical production
infrastructures yet, unless you’re comfortable with troubleshooting
and reporting back on the silly errors we’ve made while rebranding and
rebuilding.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005798/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (snapcast), Fedora (python-jinja2), Mageia (rsync), SUSE (cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, gh, kernel, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, and pam_u2f), and Ubuntu (linux-oem-6.11 and vim).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005640/

Version
3.2.0 of the Dillo
web browser has been released about a month after its 25th
anniversary. Notable new features in 3.2.0 include SVG support for
math formulas, optional support for WebP images, and more.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005546/

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.1.126 stable kernel to fix build
failures with the 6.1.125 stable
release.

Only upgrade if 6.1.125 did not build properly for you. If it did build
properly, no need to upgrade. Thanks to Ron Economos for the fix for
this issue.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004377/

The Ghostty terminal emulator
project has generated a surprising amount of interest, even before
code was released to the public. This is in part due to the high
profile of its creator, HashiCorp founder
Mitchell Hashimoto. Its development was conducted behind closed doors
for beta testing, until version 1.0 was released
on December 26 under the MIT
license. While far from finished, Ghostty is ready for day-to-day
use and might be of interest to those who spend significant amounts of
time at the command line.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005203/

Version
11.0.0 of the libvirt virtualization
API has been released. Notable changes in this release include
the ability to export virtiofs filesystems in
read-only mode, the addition of support for vlan tagging and trunking
of network interfaces with the network, qemu, and lxc drivers, as well
as a number of bug fixes.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005199/

We have just now received word of the passing
of Helen Borrie, a longtime contributor to the Firebird relational
database project.

Helen’s quiet leadership and dedication left a lasting impact on
Firebird and its users. Her efforts helped build not just a powerful
database but also a strong, collaborative community. She will be
deeply missed by all who knew her and benefited from her work.

She will be greatly missed. (Thanks to Steve Friedl.)