All posts by jzb

Edmundson: a modern Plasma Login Manager

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1015763/

KDE contributor David Edmundson has published
a blog post about improving KDE Plasma’s login experience by
replacing SDDM
with a new Plasma Login Manager.

It’s worth stressing nothing is official or set in stone yet,
whilst it has come up in previous Plasma online meetings and in the
2023 Akademy. I’m posting this whilst starting a more official
discussion on the plasma-devel mailing list.

Oliver Beard and I have made a new mutli-process greeter, that uses
the same startup mechanism as the desktop session. It doesn’t have all
the features that we propose at the start of the blog, but an
architecture where features and services can be slowly and safely
added.

That discussion is here
for those who would like to follow along. The prototype is currently
in two repositories: plasma-login
for the frontend work, and plasma-login-manager,
which is a fork of SDDM.

Bypassing Ubuntu’s user-namespace restrictions

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1015649/

Ubuntu 23.10 and 24.04 LTS introduced a feature using AppArmor to
restrict access to user namespaces. Qualys has reported
three ways to bypass AppArmor’s restrictions and enable local users to
gain full administrative capabilities within a user namespace. Ubuntu
has followed up with a post
that explains the namespace-restriction feature in detail, and says
these bypasses do not constitute security vulnerabilities.

While a superficial observation of the application of user namespaces may indicate privileged (root level) access, this is a fictitious state that is operating as expected, with access control still mapped to the real (root namespace) user’s permissions. As such, these bypasses do not enable more access than what the default Linux kernel
unprivileged user namespace feature allows in most Linux
distributions. They do, however, demonstrate limitations that we are
looking to address in order to strengthen existing protections against
as-of-yet-unknown Linux kernel vulnerabilities.

LWN covered Ubuntu 24.04 LTS last May.

Security updates for Thursday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1015589/

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (exim), Debian (exim4, ghostscript, and libcap2), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8), SUSE (apache-commons-vfs2, argocd-cli, azure-cli-core, buildah, chromedriver, docker-stable, ed25519-java, kernel, kubernetes1.29-apiserver, kubernetes1.30-apiserver, kubernetes1.32-apiserver, libmbedcrypto7, microcode_ctl, php7, podman, proftpd, tomcat10, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (containerd, exim4, mariadb, opensaml, and org-mode).

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1015464/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (nginx and ruby-rack), Fedora (expat and libxslt), Mageia (bluez, dcmtk, ffmpeg, and radare2), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel, kernel-rt, libreoffice, and podman), SUSE (buildah, forgejo, gitleaks, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, govulncheck-vulndb, grafana, helm, libxslt, php8, python-gunicorn, and python-Jinja2), and Ubuntu (freerdp2 and varnish).

Bhattcharya: Closing the chapter on OpenH264

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1015408/

Boudhayan Bhattcharya has posted a lengthy article
about the announcement
that the Freedesktop project is dropping OpenH264 from the Freedesktop SDK for Flatpak
applications and runtimes.

Some Flatpak applications that depend on the Freedesktop runtime
version 23.08 will lose H.264 playback support starting with the
release scheduled for April, unless application developers replace it
with the ffmpeg-full extension. The 24.08 runtime is
unaffected, and future releases will include a new
codecs-extra extension to replace OpenH264 that includes FFmpeg with support for a number of
patented codecs.

Considering all things, I think and hope we made the correct decision
and hopefully the new org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra works
out. libx264, libx265 and others are built from source and there are
no binaries or extra-data involved. So we should theoretically be able
to patch and fix any issues that come up in the future.

Apart from all this, I’m slightly worried at the prospects of legal
issues cropping up with this setup and also that the new extension
contains “too much”, but we will have to see where things flow.

[$] OSI election ends with unsatisfying results

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1014603/

The Open Source Initiative
(OSI) has announced
the results of its recent board of directors election. Ruth Suehle and
McCoy Smith are new to the board, while Carlo Piana will serve another
term. The results, however, seem tainted in the eyes of some
participants and observers. The election has been plagued by missteps
from the beginning. It has culminated with the exclusion of three
candidates for failing to meet a requirement to sign the OSI board agreement, which was added after the election was over and before results were tallied or announced.

Introducing rpi-image-gen for customized Raspberry Pi images

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1015059/

Raspberry Pi has
announced rpi-image-gen,
a tool to create custom software images for its devices.

rpi-image-gen is a Bash orientated scripting engine capable of
producing software images with different on-disk partition layouts,
file systems and profiles using collections of metadata and a defined
flow of execution. It provides the means to create a highly customised
software image for your Raspberry Pi device. rpi-image-gen is human
readable, auditable and easy to use.

The Git repository for rpi-image-gen has a number of examples
to help users get started making their own custom images.

GNOME 48 released

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1014799/

GNOME 48 (“Bengaluru”)
has been released. As usual, this release includes a number of new
features and enhancements including support for shortcuts in the Orca
screen reader on Wayland, new fonts, addition of image editing to
Image Viewer, and more.

GNOME 48 includes a number of notable performance improvements. The
most significant of these is the introduction of dynamic triple
buffering. This change has undergone significant review and testing
over a period of five years and improves the perceived smoothness of
changes on screen, with fewer skipped frames and more fluid
animations. This has been achieved by enhancing the concurrency
capabilities of Mutter, the GNOME display manager, and is particularly
effective at handling sudden bursts of activity.

The GNOME 48 release also adds new applications to the GNOME Circle collection,
such as Drum Machine
and the Iotas note-taking
application. See “What’s new
for developers” a rundown of improvements for developers in
GNOME 48.

[$] A look at /e/OS on tablet hardware

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006557/

/e⁠/⁠OS is a
privacy-centric, open-source mobile operating system that
has primarily been targeted at mobile phones, with only a few
community supported images available for tablet devices. In December,
Murena—a company that sells devices with /⁠e⁠/⁠OS
preinstalled—announced
that /⁠e⁠/⁠OS now officially supports tablets as well, starting with the
Pixel tablet. The user experience is close enough to
mainstream alternatives to make it attractive, but there are some
under-the-hood problems that may give users pause.

[$] Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1014002/

If all goes according to plan, the Ubuntu project will soon be
replacing many of the traditional GNU utilities with implementations
written in Rust, such as those created by the uutils project, which we covered in
February. Wholesale replacement of core utilities at the heart of a
Linux distribution is no small matter, which is why Canonical’s VP of
engineering, Jon Seager, has released oxidizr. It
is a command-line utility that helps users easily enable or disable
the Rust-based utilities to test their suitability. Seager is calling
for help with testing and for users to provide feedback with their
experiences ahead of a possible switch for Ubuntu 25.10, an interim release
scheduled for October 2025. So far, responses from the Ubuntu
community seem positive if slightly skeptical of such a major
change.

GIMP 3.0 released

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1014465/

The long-awaited GIMP
3.0 release is now available. Major changes in 3.0 include non‑destructive
editing for most commonly‑used filters, improved text creation,
better color space management, and an update to GTK 3.

This is the end result of seven years of hard work by volunteer
developers, designers, artists, and community members (for reference,
GIMP 2.10 was first published in 2018 and the initial development
version of GIMP 3.0 was released
in 2020).

See the release
notes and NEWS
file for more details about this release. LWN covered a near-final
release of GIMP 3.0 in November last year.

[$] The burden of knowledge: dealing with open-source risks

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1013614/

Organizations relying on open-source software have a wide range of
tools, scorecards, and methodologies to try to assess security, legal,
and other risks inherent in
their so-called supply chain. However, Max Mehl argued
recently in a short talk at FOSS Backstage in Berlin (and
online) that all of
this objective information and data is insufficient to truly
understand and address risk. Worse, this information doesn’t provide
options to improve the situation and encourages a passive mindset. Mehl, who works as part of
the CTO group at DB Systel, encouraged better risk assessment using
qualitative data and direct participation in open source.

Choi: announcing Casual Make

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1014065/

Charles Choi has announced
the release of the Casual
Make: a menu-driven interface, implemented as part of the Casual
suite of tools, for Makefile
Mode in GNU Emacs.

Emacs supports makefile editing with make-mode which has a mix of
useful and half-baked (though thankfully obsoleted in 30.1)
commands. It is from this substrate that I’m happy to announce the
next Casual user interface: Casual Make.

Of particular note to Casual Make is its attention to authoring and
identifying automatic variables whose arcane syntax is
un-memorizable. Want to know what $> means? Just select it in the
makefile and use the . binding in the Casual Make menu to identify
what it does in the mini-buffer.

Casual Make is part of Casual
2.4.0, released on March 12 and is available from MELPA. The 2.4.0 update to
Casual also includes documentation in the Info format for the first time.