All posts by jzb

Nominations are open for the PSF Board election

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978149/

The Python Software
Foundation
(PSF) has announced
that nominations are open for the PSF Board election through June
25:

Who runs for the board? People who care about the Python community,
who want to see it flourish and grow, and also have a few hours a
month to attend regular meetings, serve on committees, participate in
conversations, and promote the Python community.

The PSF has a video about
serving on the board for those who might be interested. PSF members
can nominate themselves or another member. Candidates
will be announced on June 27. Voting begins on July 2 and will end on
July 16.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978136/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (booth), Debian (cyrus-imapd and vlc), Fedora (firefox, libarchive, php, and singularity-ce), Oracle (ipa and ruby:3.3), Red Hat (389-ds-base, buildah, c-ares, cockpit, containernetworking-plugins, fence-agents, gdk-pixbuf2, gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, libreoffice, podman, protobuf-c, python-idna, rpm-ostree, ruby, and tomcat), Slackware (cups and mozilla), SUSE (bind, cups, iperf, kernel, nano, and poppler), and Ubuntu (libapache-mod-jk, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-aws, linux-oracle, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-nvidia, and mysql-8.0).

[$] Ladybird browser spreads its wings

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/976822/

Ladybird is an open-source
project aimed at building an independent web browser, rather than
yet another browser based on Chrome. It is written in C++ and licensed under a
two-clause BSD license. The effort
began as part of the SerenityOS project, but
developer Andreas Kling announced
on June 3 that he was “forking” Ladybird as a separate project and stepping away from
SerenityOS to focus his attention on the browser completely. Ladybird
is not ready to replace Firefox or Chrome for regular use, but it is showing
great promise.

Kali Linux 2024.2 released

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/977303/

Version 2024.2 of the Kali Linux penetration testing distribution
has been released. This
release includes an update to GNOME
46
, a high-resolution (HiDPI) mode for Xfce, as well as a number
of new packages such as the AutoRecon network
reconnaissance tool, pspy command-line utility for
snooping on Linux processes, and SploitScan tool for
fetching and displaying CVE information. Kali Linux is based on Debian
testing, and 2024.2 incorporates Debian’s work to transition to 64-bit
time_t
to avoid year 2038 problems. Users with existing Kali
systems should be sure to follow the documentation
when upgrading.

[$] Rethinking the PostgreSQL CommitFest model

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/976793/

Many years ago, the PostgreSQL project started holding regular CommitFests to
help tackle the work of reviewing and committing patches in a more
organized fashion. That has served the project well, but some in
the project are concerned that CommitFests are no longer meeting
the needs of PostgreSQL or its contributors. A lengthy discussion on the
pgsql-hackers mailing list turned up a number of complaints, a few
suggestions for improvement, but little consensus or momentum toward
a solution.

The state of SourceHut

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/977174/

Drew DeVault has published
an update about the state of the SourceHut software development
platform and its plans for the coming months. This is the first update
since the January post-mortem
following a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that resulted
in a prolonged
outage
:

As you can imagine, it has been a stressful time for us. However, I
wish to stress that everything we’ve been dealing with is planned for
in our models, both technical and financial. There is no existential
threat to SourceHut. Nevertheless, we are grateful for your patience
and support.

[…] We have been focusing on two things this year: provisioning
and managing our infrastructure and getting as much rest as
possible. Our situation has calmed down, and while we still have a lot
of loose ends to attend to I’m happy to say that we’re resuming a
sense of normalcy here and preparing to resume our work on the
features you need.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/977233/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (deepin-qt5integration, deepin-qt5platform-plugins, dotnet8.0, dwayland, fcitx-qt5, fcitx5-qt, gammaray, kddockwidgets, keepassxc, kf5-akonadi-server, kf5-frameworkintegration, kf5-kwayland, plasma-integration, python-qt5, qadwaitadecorations, qgnomeplatform, qt5, qt5-qt3d, qt5-qtbase, qt5-qtcharts, qt5-qtconnectivity, qt5-qtdatavis3d, qt5-qtdeclarative, qt5-qtdoc, qt5-qtgamepad, qt5-qtgraphicaleffects, qt5-qtimageformats, qt5-qtlocation, qt5-qtmultimedia, qt5-qtnetworkauth, qt5-qtquickcontrols, qt5-qtquickcontrols2, qt5-qtremoteobjects, qt5-qtscript, qt5-qtscxml, qt5-qtsensors, qt5-qtserialbus, qt5-qtserialport, and qt5-qtspeech), Oracle (389-ds-base and ruby:3.1), Red Hat (389-ds-base, glibc, and kernel), SUSE (python-PyMySQL), and Ubuntu (libarchive).

LyX 2.4.0 Released

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/976826/

Version 2.4.0 of the LyX
document processor has been released. LyX is a “What You See Is What You
Mean
” (WYSIWYM) application that offers GUI editing of LaTeX
documents with import and export to PDF, HTML, OpenDocument, Word, and
other formats. LyX 2.4.0 is the first major release in six years, and
brings support for EPUB, DocBook 5, improved
table styles, and now uses Unicode (utf8) as its default encoding. See
the full list of new
features on the LyX wiki, and release
notes
for information on known issues and caveats for those
upgrading from earlier versions of LyX.

[$] Debian’s /tmpest in a teapot

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/975565/

Debian had a major discussion
about mounting /tmp as a RAM-based tmpfs in 2012 but inertia
won out in the end. Debian systems have continued to
store temporary files on disk by default. Until now. A mere
12 years later, the project will be switching to a RAM-based /tmp in the Debian
13 (“Trixie”) release. Additionally, starting with Trixie, the
default will be to periodically clean up temporary files automatically in
/tmp and /var/tmp. Naturally, it involved a lengthy discussion first.

Fedora Linux 40 election results

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/976447/

The Fedora Project has announced
the results of the Fedora Linux 40 election cycle. Four seats were
open on the Fedora
Engineering Steering Committee
(FESCo), and the winners are Stephen
Gallagher, Neal Gompa, Michel Lind, and Fabio Valentini. The Fedora
Council
had two seats open, and the winners
are
Aleksandra Fedorova and Adam Samalik. One seat was open on the
Fedora Mindshare
Committee
, and the winner
is
Sumantro Mukherjee. Four seats were open for the first election to select
members of the EPEL
Steering Committee
, which went to Troy
Dawson, Kevin Fenzi, Carl George, and Jonathan Wright.

Opt Green: KDE Eco’s New Sustainable Software Project

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/976176/

KDE Eco, a KDE project focused
on reducing software’s environmental impact, has announced its Opt
Green
campaign to reduce e-waste:

Over the next two years, the “Opt Green” initiative will bring what
KDE Eco has been doing for sustainable software directly to end
users. A particular target group for the project is those whose
consumer behavior is driven by principles related to the environment,
and not just price or convenience: the “eco-consumers”.

Through online and offline campaigns as well as installation
workshops, we will demonstrate the power of Free Software to drive
down resource and energy consumption, and keep devices in use for the
lifespan of the hardware, not the software.

Our motto: The most environmentally-friendly device is the
one you already own.

See the KDE Eco Get
Involved
page for more information on how to participate.

[$] Fedora approves shipping pre-built macOS binaries

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/975445/

The Asahi Linux project works
to support Linux on Apple Silicon hardware. The
project’s flagship
distribution is the Fedora
Asahi Remix
, which has its own installer (rather than Anaconda) to
accommodate the unique requirements of installing on Apple’s
hardware. Previously the installer was built by the Asahi project, but it has asked for (and received) an exception
from the Fedora
Engineering Steering Committee
(FESCo) to include two binaries
from upstream open-source projects so that the installer can be built on Fedora
infrastructure.

Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/975807/

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced
the 2024
FreeBSD Community Survey Report
. The report provides a summary of
1,446 responses to an anonymous online survey of FreeBSD users. It
provides insights into user profiles, typical usage, how the FreeBSD
project is viewed, as well as recommendations for expanding the
FreeBSD community and contributor base:

Currently fewer than half of users consider FreeBSD their daily
driver; Individuals are less likely than Corporate Users to consider
FreeBSD primary. The barrier seems to be less about software and more
about hardware support, particularly around Wi-Fi drivers (which are
at the top of the wish list for the Foundation to focus on in the
coming year). A relatively high number of those who don’t consider
FreeBSD their main OS say they would consider doing so with hardware
support for desktops and laptops that was equivalent to Linux.

The raw
data
for the survey is available as well.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/975737/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (glibc and tomcat), Fedora (chromium, fcitx5-qt, python-pyqt6, qadwaitadecorations, qgnomeplatform, qt6, qt6-qt3d, qt6-qt5compat, qt6-qtbase, qt6-qtcharts, qt6-qtcoap, qt6-qtconnectivity, qt6-qtdatavis3d, qt6-qtdeclarative, qt6-qtgraphs, qt6-qtgrpc, qt6-qthttpserver, qt6-qtimageformats, qt6-qtlanguageserver, qt6-qtlocation, qt6-qtlottie, qt6-qtmqtt, qt6-qtmultimedia, qt6-qtnetworkauth, qt6-qtopcua, qt6-qtpositioning, qt6-qtquick3d, qt6-qtquick3dphysics, qt6-qtquicktimeline, qt6-qtremoteobjects, qt6-qtscxml, qt6-qtsensors, qt6-qtserialbus, qt6-qtserialport, qt6-qtshadertools, qt6-qtspeech, qt6-qtsvg, qt6-qttools, qt6-qttranslations, qt6-qtvirtualkeyboard, qt6-qtwayland, qt6-qtwebchannel, qt6-qtwebengine, qt6-qtwebsockets, qt6-qtwebview, and zeal), Red Hat (glibc, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, linux-firmware, mod_http2, pcp, pcs, protobuf, python3, rpm-ostree, and rust), SUSE (git, glibc-livepatches, kernel, libxml2, openssl-1_1, SUSE Manager Client Tools, SUSE Manager Client Tools, salt, and xdg-desktop-portal), and Ubuntu (amavisd-new, firefox, flask-security, frr, git, intel-microcode, jinja2, libreoffice, linux-intel-iotg, unbound, and webkit2gtk).

[$] Readying DNF5 for Fedora 41

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/969640/

With the release of Fedora 40 it’s time to
start looking ahead to what Fedora 41 has in store. One of the largest
changes planned for the next release is a switch to
DNF5, a C++ rewrite of the DNF
package manager. A previous attempt to make the switch, during the Fedora 39 cycle, was called off, and
deferred to Fedora 41. The developers have had nearly a year to address
compatibility problems and bring DNF5 to a state suitable to replace DNF4. Signs point to a successful switch in
the upcoming release, though there may be a few surprises lurking for Fedora users.

KDE Gear 24.05.0

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/974708/

The KDE Project has announced the
release of KDE Gear 24.05.0, with new features and updates for the
more than 200 applications that
are part of the project. In addition to new versions of the Dolphin
file manager, Kdenlive video
editor, and Elisa music player, this
release includes five applications new to KDE Gear: the Audex CD-ripper application,
an application Accessibility
Inspector
, the Francis
Pomodoro timer, Kalm to teach breathing techniques, and a Sokoban-like game
called Skladnik. See the
full
changelog
for a complete list of changes.

[$] The KeePassXC kerfuffle

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/973782/

KeePassXC is an open-source (GPLv3),
cross-platform password manager with local-only data storage. The
project comes with a number of build
options
that can be used to toggle optional features, such as browser
integration
and password
database sharing
. However, controversy ensued when Debian Developer Julian Klode decided to
make use of these compile flags to disable these features to improve security in the
keepassxc package uploaded to Debian unstable for the
upcoming Debian 13 (“Trixie”) release.