Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029597/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gnome-remote-desktop, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, jq, kernel, kernel-rt, libxml2, and podman), Fedora (chromium, git, helix, pam, rust-blazesym-c, rust-clearscreen, rust-gitui, rust-nu-cli, rust-nu-command, rust-nu-test-support, rust-procs, rust-which, selenium-manager, sudo, thunderbird, and uv), SUSE (audiofile, chmlib-devel, docker, firefox, go1, libsoup, libsoup2, libssh, libxml2, tomcat, umoci, and xen), and Ubuntu (git and resteasy, resteasy3.0).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1028558/

Few, if any, web sites or web-based services have gone unscathed by
the locust-like hordes of AI crawlers looking to consume (and then
re-consume) all of the world’s content. The Anubis project is designed to
provide a first line of defense that blocks mindless bots—while
granting real users access to sites without too much hassle. Anubis is
a young project, not even a year old. However, its development is
moving quickly, and the project seems to be enjoying rapid
adoption. The most recent release of Anubis, version
1.20.0, includes a feature that many users have been interested in
since the project launched: support for challenging clients without
requiring users to have JavaScript turned on.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029313/

Version
3.3 of the Amarok music
player has been released. This is the first release of Amarok based on
KDE Frameworks 6
and Qt 6. Amarok 3.3
also includes a major rework of its audio engine to use GStreamer for audio
playback.

The reworked audio engine provides unified feature set for all users
and should provide a solid and future-proof sonic experience for years
to come. Notable improvements have also landed to the database system:
improved character set support helps with e.g. emojis in podcast
descriptions and other very exotic symbols, date handling has been
improved (‘year 2038 problem’), and various other potential and actual
database-related issues have been fixed.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029312/

The AlmaLinux project has announced
new upgrade paths for its ELevate utility, which
allows users to upgrade between major versions of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux derivatives. The new paths include upgrades from AlmaLinux 9
to AlmaLinux 10 and CentOS Stream 9 to
CentOS Stream 10, with support for EPEL, Docker CE, and
PostgreSQL third-party package repositories. LWN covered ELevate last
year.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029278/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools:rhel8, jq, kernel, podman, python-setuptools, socat, and thunderbird), Gentoo (Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge. Opera, ClamAV, Git, NTP, REXML, and strongSwan), Oracle (buildah, gnome-remote-desktop, ipa, jq, kernel, podman, python-setuptools, ruby:3.3, socat, uek-kernel, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (kernel), and Ubuntu (freerdp3, git, gnupg2, linux-aws, linux-oracle, linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.11, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-nvidia-tegra,
linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oem-6.11, and onionshare).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029175/

Version
140 of the Thunderbird mail client has been released. Notable
features include “dark message mode” to adapt message content
to dark mode, the ability to easily transfer desktop
settings to the mobile Thunderbird client, experimental support for
Microsoft Exchange, as well as global controls for message threading
and sort order.

Thunderbird 140 is an extended-support
release (ESR) which will be supported for 12 months. However, the
Thunderbird project is trying to encourage users to adopt the Release
channel for monthly updates instead. The project is staggering
upgrades to 140 for existing Thunderbird users in order to catch any
significant bugs before they are widely deployed, but users can
upgrade manually via the Help > About
menu. See the release
notes for a full list of changes.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025866/

Niri
is a relatively new Rust-based compositor
for Wayland with a different take on tiling window management: windows
are placed onscreen in an “infinite” row that can expand beyond the
bounds of the visible workspace. It is not a full-blown desktop
environment, but niri may be a suitable option for Linux users who
want tiling features and the minimalism of a window manager for
Wayland.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1028583/

Collin Richards has announced version
0.0.1 of tmux-rs, a port of the tmux terminal multiplexer
to Rust.

For the [past] 6 months or so I’ve been quietly porting tmux from C to
Rust. I’ve recently reached a big milestone: the code base is now 100%
(unsafe) Rust. I’d like to share the process of porting the original
codebase from ~67,000 lines of C code to ~81,000 lines of Rust
(excluding comments and empty lines). You might be asking: why did you
rewrite tmux in Rust? And yeah, I don’t really have a good
reason. It’s a hobby project. Like gardening, but with more segfaults.

Richards says that the next goal for the project is to convert it
to safe Rust. It is currently “not very difficult to get it to
crash“, but he wanted to share the project with other Rust fans
now. The project is available on
GitHub.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1028224/

Debian’s Bananas team has put
out a call for people with Apple M1 or M2 systems to help test
Debian on those machines:

The Bananas Team has set up an installer at with images
for GNOME, KDE and console installations. While we’d like to build an
actual Debian installer sooner or later (we may need a heads-up from the
Debian Images team for that), at this time we only provide an asahi-type
installer, which installs both the “bootloader” and the OS partitions to
disk from the network (as opposed to only installing the bootloader and
then letting you install Debian using a d-i USB stick). We haven’t
forked Trixie from Testing yet, so what you’ll get is Debian Testing
quite deep into the freeze.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1028160/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (apache-commons-beanutils, firefox, kea, kernel, kernel-rt, libblockdev, libvpx, pam, python-setuptools, python3, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, and sudo), Debian (chromium), Gentoo (sudo), Oracle (.NET 8.0, buildah, firefox, freerdp, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, gvisor-tap-vsock, libsoup3, mod_proxy_cluster, perl-FCGI, podman, python-setuptools, qt6-qtbase, skopeo, sudo, and thunderbird), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (redis, runc, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (composer, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke,
linux-gkeop, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia,
linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oem-6.8, linux-oracle,
linux-oracle-6.8, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop,
linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency,
linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.11, linux-hwe-6.11, linux-oracle,
linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-lts-xenial, linux, linux-gcp, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-fips, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-realtime, and linux-realtime, linux-raspi-realtime).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1026917/

A change
proposal to end support for 32-bit x86 (i686) applications on the
x86_64 architecture with the Fedora 44 release has been withdrawn
after significant pushback. As proposed, the change could have
had a significant impact on gamers, compiler development, and the Bazzite project, which uses Fedora as a
base for a gaming-focused distribution. While i686 gets a reprieve for
now, the question still lingers: who is going to keep the necessary
i686 packages in working order when few upstream maintainers or
volunteer packagers care about the architecture?

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1026895/

The NLnet Foundation has announced
a new group of projects receiving funding through the Next
Generation Internet (NGI) Zero Commons Fund.

Free and open source technologies, open standards, open hardware and
open data help to strengthen the open web and the open internet. The
projects selected by NLnet all contribute in their own way to this
important goal, and will empower end users and the community at large
on different layers of the stack. For example, there are people
working a browser controlled ad hoc cellular network (Wsdr) which can be used to
create small mobile networks where they are needed. The open hardware
security key Nitrokey is
aiming for formal certification of their implementation of the FIDO2
standard, and will be adding encrypted storage
capabilities. There are also more applied technologies: the high
end open hardware microscope OpenFlexure will
enable among others e-health use cases such as telepathology, allowing
medical professionals to work together to help people in more remote
areas.

See the announcement for the full list of selected projects and the
current projects
page for other projects recently funded by NLnet.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025971/

Libxml2, an
XML parser and toolkit, is an almost perfect example of the successes
and failures of the open-source movement. In the 25 years since its
first release, it has been widely adopted by open-source projects, for
use in commercial software, and for government use. It also
illustrates that while many organizations love using open-source software,
far fewer have yet to see value in helping to sustain it. That has led
libxml2’s current maintainer to reject security embargoes and sparked
a discussion about maintenance terms for free and open-source
projects.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1026848/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (commons-beanutils, dcmtk, nginx, trafficserver, and xorg-server), Fedora (atuin, awatcher, dotnet8.0, firefox, glibc, gotify-desktop, keylime-agent-rust, libtpms, mirrorlist-server, qt6-qtbase, qt6-qtimageformats, udisks2, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (apache-mod_security, clamav, docker, python-django, tomcat, udisks2, and yarnpkg), Oracle (firefox, libblockdev, mod_auth_openidc, perl-FCGI, perl-YAML-LibYAML, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (libssh and mozilla), SUSE (gimp, gstreamer-plugins-good, icu, ignition, kernel, pam-config, perl-File-Find-Rule, python311, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm,
linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia,
linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oem-6.8, linux, linux-gcp, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.8, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fips, and linux-realtime).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1026552/

KDE contributor Nate Graham recently wrote
about the KDE Project’s plans for Plasma’s X11 session. He notes that
the project will continue to ensure that Plasma “continues to
compile and deploy on X11” and isn’t horribly broken. Major
regressions will probably be fixed, eventually, but the writing is on
the wall:

X11’s upstream development has dropped off significantly in recent
years, and X11 isn’t able to perform up to the standards of what
people expect today with respect to HDR, 10 bits-per-color monitors,
other fancy monitor features, multi-monitor setups (especially with
mixed DPIs or refresh rates), multi-GPU setups, screen tearing,
security, crash robustness, input handling, and more.

As for when Plasma will drop support for X11? There’s currently no
firm timeline for this, and I certainly don’t expect it to happen in
the next year, or even the next two years. But that’s just a guess; it
depends on how quickly we implement everything on
https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues. Our
plan is to handle everything on that page such that even the most
hardcore X11 user doesn’t notice anything missing when they move to
Wayland.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1026531/

The postmarketOS project,
which creates a Linux distribution for mobile devices, announced
it was working on adding a version with systemd last March. That day
has arrived with the announcement
of version 25.06:

We considered supporting an upgrade from OpenRC to systemd in our
upgrade script, but then decided against it as such an upgrade path
might introduce its own bugs and we would rather spend the time
improving other parts of postmarketOS. So for this one-time scenario
we ask you to please reinstall postmarketOS to get from OpenRC to
systemd. Thank you for your understanding!

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025560/

Adrian Vovk, a GNOME contributor and member of its release
team, recently announced
in a blog post that GNOME would be adding new dependencies on systemd, and soon. The idea is to shed
GNOME’s homegrown service manager in favor of using systemd, and to
improve GNOME’s ability to run concurrent user sessions. However, the
move is also going to throw a spanner in the works for the BSDs and
Linux distributions without systemd when the changes take effect in
the GNOME 49 release that is set for September.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025863/

The KDE Project has announced the
Plasma 6.4 release. New features include more flexible tiling
features, improvements to the Spectacle screen capture utility, a
number of accessibility enhancements, and much more. See the changelog
for a complete list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025862/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-plugins-bad1.0, konsole, and libblockdev), Oracle (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, gimp, git-lfs, gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel, libvpx, podman, and skopeo), Red Hat (apache-commons-beanutils and thunderbird), Slackware (xorg), SUSE (gdm, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, golang-github-prometheus-node_exporter, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, govulncheck-vulndb, grafana, kernel, Multi-Linux Manager, Multi-Linux Manager Client Tools, openssl-3, pam, python-cryptography, python-requests, python-setuptools, python3-requests, SUSE Manager Server, systemd, ucode-intel, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (dwarfutils, mujs, node-katex, xorg-server, xorg-server-hwe-16.04, xorg-server-hwe-18.04, and xorg-server, xwayland).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025127/

Accessibility features and the work that goes into developing those features
often tend to be overlooked and are poorly understood by all but the people who actually
depend on such features. At Fedora’s annual developer conference, Flock, Lukáš Tyrychtr sought to
improve understanding and raise awareness about accessibility with his session on accessibility
barriers and screen-reader functionality in GNOME. His talk provided rare insight
into the world of using and developing open-source software for visually-impaired
users—including landing important accessibility improvements in
the latest GNOME release.