All posts by jzb

A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

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.

Puppet fork OpenVox makes first release

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.

Security updates for Wednesday

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).

[$] Ghostty 1.0 has been summoned

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.

RIP Helen Borrie

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.)

Security updates for Wednesday

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).

The people should own the town square (Mastodon Blog)

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.

[$] The slow death of TuxFamily

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.

IPU6 camera support status update

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.

[$] The state of Vim

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.

Automattic reduces WordPress contributions

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.]

2024: Year in Review (Tor Blog)

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.

Announcing the pkgsrc-2024Q4 branch

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.

Security updates for Wednesday

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).

2024 in retrospect (Gentoo News)

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.