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.)

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005165/

Linux Mint version
22.1, a long-term-support (LTS) release with support until 2029, is now
available. Notable changes in this release include a transition to Aptkit for background
package management tasks, Captain to install
Debian packages, and a new default theme with improved Wayland
compatibility. See the release notes for
known issues.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005163/

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (rsync), Debian (rsync), Fedora (perl-Net-OAuth and redis), Red Hat (ipa, raptor2, rsync, and tuned), Slackware (rsync), SUSE (apache2-mod_jk, git, kernel, rclone, rsync, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (git, linux-azure-5.4, pdns, pdns-recursor, python-django, rlottie, and rsync).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005007/

The Mastodon project has announced
that founder Eugen Rochko will be transferring “key Mastodon
ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights,
among other assets)” to a new non-profit organization:

Practically Mastodon will remain headquartered in and operate from
Europe primarily. We will continue day-to-day operations through the
Mastodon GmbH for-profit entity, which will become wholly owned by the
new European not-for-profit entity. The Mastodon GmbH entity
automatically became a for-profit as a result of its charitable status
being stripped
away in Germany. The existing US-based non-profit entity, the
501(c)(3), will continue to function as a fundraising hub.

[…] We are in the process of a phased transition. First we are
establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership
and stewardship. We are taking the time to select the appropriate
jurisdiction and structure in Europe. Then we will determine which
other (subsidiary) legal structures are needed to support operations
and sustainability.

Rochko has, naturally, also posted
about the transition on Mastodon.social.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004988/

TuxFamily is a
French free-software-hosting service that has been in operation since
1999. It is a non-profit that accepts “any project
released under a free license“, whether that is a software license
or a free-content license, such as CC-BY-SA. It is also,
unfortunately, slowly dying due to hardware failures and lack of
interest. For example, the site’s download servers are currently
offline with no plan to restore them.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005031/

Hans de Goede has posted an
update about his work to support IPU6 cameras on Fedora and
submitting fixes upstream.

The initial IPU6 camera support landed in Fedora 41 only works on a
limited set of laptops. The reason for this is that with MIPI cameras
every different sensor and glue-chip like IO-expanders needs to be
supported separately.

I have been working on making the camera work on more laptop
models. After receiving and sending many emails and blog post comments
about this I have started filing Fedora bugzilla issues on a per
sensor and/or laptop-model basis to be able to properly keep track of
all the work.

LWN covered the lack
of IPU6 drivers in 2022.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004776/

Version
2.48.0 of the Git source-code management system has been
released. There is a long list of incremental improvements and bug
fixes; see the announcement and the highlights
blog from GitHub for details.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1002342/

The death of Bram Moolenaar, Vim
founder and benevolent dictator for life (BDFL), in 2023 sent a shock
through the community, and raised concern about the future of the
project. At VimConf 2024 in
November, current Vim maintainer Christian Brabandt delivered a
keynote on “the new Vim project” that detailed how the
community has reorganized itself to continue maintaining Vim and what
the future looks like.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004705/

Automattic has announced
that it is reallocating its resources away from contributing to the
WordPress project as a response to the WP Engine lawsuit:

As part of this reset, Automattic will match its volunteering pledge
with those made by WP Engine and other players in the ecosystem, or
about 45 hours a week that qualify under the Five For the Future
program as benefitting the entire community and not just a single
company. These hours will likely go towards security and critical
updates.

LWN last covered
the ongoing WordPress saga in December. [Thanks to Paul Wise for the
heads-up on this latest development.]

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004460/

The Tor Project has published a
review of major milestones from 2024, including merging with
the Tails project, work to enable human-friendly .onion
addresses, and the launch of WebTunnel:

By mimicking common internet protocols, WebTunnel improves the
resilience of the Tor network in regions with heavy censorship. And
since its launch earlier this year, we’ve made sure to prioritize
small download sizes for more convenient distribution and simplified
the support of uTLS integration further mimicking the characteristics
of more widespread browsers. This makes Webtunnel safe for general
users because it helps conceal the fact that a tool like Tor is being
used.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004429/

The pkgsrc developers have
announced the 2024Q4 branch of the pkgsrc cross-platform
packaging system. It is the default package manager for NetBSD, SmartOS, and is available for
Linux as well. This marks the 85th quarterly release of pkgsrc:

Since the pkgsrc-2024Q3 release, 110 packages were added, 1580 packages
were updated (with 2399 updates, including language-specific updates:
24 Go, 3 OCaml, 66 Perl, 5 PHP, 626 Python, 282 Ruby, 44 TeX). 33
packages were removed.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004428/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (firefox, mupdf, and php-tcpdf), SUSE (etcd, file-roller, gtk3, kernel, python-django-ckeditor, rubygem-json-jwt, and tomcat10), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, HTMLDOC, linux-aws, linux-raspi, linux-gke, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, and tinyproxy).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004373/

Gentoo Linux has published a project
retrospective that looks at the major improvements and news from
2024, the Gentoo Foundation’s finances, and contributions to Gentoo by
the numbers.

The number of commits to the main ::gentoo
repository has remained at an overall high level in 2024, with a
2.4% increase from 121000 to 123942. The number of commits by external
contributors has grown strongly from 10708 to 12812, now across 421
unique external authors.

The importance of GURU, our
user-curated repository with a trusted user model, as entry point
for potential developers, is clearly increasing as well. We have had
7517 commits in 2024, a strong growth from 5045 in 2023. The number of
contributors to GURU has increased a lot as well, from 158 in 2023 to
241 in 2024. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and
greatest software.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004204/

In the past, LWN had a tradition of publishing a timeline of
notable events from the previous year in early January. We thought we
might try reviving that tradition in 2025 to see if our readers find
it useful. While we have covered these events as they
happened, it’s interesting to see how much has taken place in just
12 months.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004368/

Version 134.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include support for touchpad hold gestures on Linux, a refreshed layout for the New Tab page for users in the US and Canada, and improved support for debugging web extensions.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003913/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-django and python-tornado), Fedora (libxml2), and Red Hat (python-virtualenv and python36:3.6).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003462/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (sympa and tomcat), Red Hat (kernel), and SUSE (poppler).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1002398/

The systemd v257 release brings a number of incremental
enhancements to various components and utilities for working with
Linux systems. This includes more support for varlink, automated
downloading of disk images at boot time, and a number of improvements
to the secure-boot process for unified kernel images (UKIs), which we
have covered in a separate
article.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003303/

The Fedora Project has announced
the results of the Fedora Linux 41 election cycle. Five seats were
open on the Fedora Engineering
Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners
are Kevin Fenzi, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, David Cantrell, Tomáš
Hrčka, and Fabio Alessandro Locati. One seat was open on the Mindshare
Committee and that went to Luis Bazan as the only eligible
candidate nominated in this period.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003200/

Version
5.0.0 of the darktable
photography workflow application has been released. Major changes in
this release include user-interface/user-experience (UI/UX)
improvements, speed improvements for bulk operations, and the addition
of a inter-script-communication event to allow a running
script to send messages to another running script. LWN last looked at darktable in
2022.