All posts by jzb

LXQt 2.1.0 released

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/997034/

Version
2.1.0 of the LXQt
lightweight Qt desktop environment has been released. The highlight of
this release is support for multiple Wayland compositors:

Through its new component lxqt-wayland-session, LXQt 2.1.0
supports 7 Wayland sessions (with Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland,
Sway, River and Niri), has two Wayland back-ends in
lxqt-panel (one for kwin_wayland and the other
general), and will add more later. All LXQt components that are not
limited to X11 — i.e., most components — work fine on Wayland. […]

Of course, the X11 session will be supported
indefinitely. Wayland is optional and rather experimental.

[$] OSI board AMA at All Things Open

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/996356/

Members of the Open Source
Initiative (OSI) board sat down for a 45-minute “Ask Me Anything”
(AMA) session at All Things
Open in Raleigh, NC on October 29. Though the floor was open to
any topic the audience might want to ask of the OSI board. Many of the
questions were focused on the Open Source
AI Definition (OSAID), which was announced the day
before. The new definition has been somewhat controversial,
and the board spent a lot of time addressing concerns about it during
the session, as well as questions on open washing, and a need for more
education about open source in general.

October project goals update (Rust Blog)

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/996585/

The Rust blog has an update
on its progress on some of its project
goals. One of the project’s flagship
goals is to resolve
the biggest blockers to Linux building on stable Rust:

Finally, we have been finding an increasing number of stabilization
requests at the compiler level, and so @wesleywiser and @davidtwco
from the compiler team have started attending meetings to create a
faster response. One of the results of that collaboration is RFC #3716,
authored by Alice Ryhl, which proposes a method to manage compiler
flags that modify the target ABI. Our previous approach has been to
create distinct targets for each combination of flags, but the number
of flags needed by the kernel make that impractical. Authoring the RFC
revealed more such flags than previously recognized, including those
that modify LLVM behavior.

A new release of Raspberry Pi OS

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/996332/

The Raspberry Pi project has announced
a new version of Raspberry Pi OS. It includes a number of
significant changes, the most notable of which is that the Raspberry
Pi Desktop now uses Wayland by default for all Pi models using the
labwc compositor:

For most of this year, we have been working on porting labwc to the
Raspberry Pi Desktop. This has very much been a collaborative process
with the developers of both labwc and wlroots: both have helped us
immensely with their support as we contribute features and
optimisations needed for our desktop.

This release also features Linux 6.6.51, improved touchscreen support, a new
screen configuration tool called raindrop, and more. See the
release
notes for a full list of changes.

Thunderbird for Android now available

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/996326/

The first stable release of the Thunderbird mail client for Android is now available:

Just over two years ago, we announced
our plans to bring Thunderbird to Android by taking K-9 Mail under
our wing. The journey took a little
longer than we had originally anticipated and there was a lot to
learn along the way, but the wait is finally over! For all of you who
have ever asked “when is Thunderbird for Android coming out?”, the
answer is – today!

It is immediately available on the Google
Play Store, via GitHub
Releases, or from the Thunderbird web site, and
it will be “coming soon” to the F-Droid repository for FOSS Android
applications. See the release
notes for detailed information about Thunderbird 8.0 for
Android.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/996310/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah), Debian (python-git, texlive-bin, and xorg-server), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), Red Hat (kernel), SUSE (Botan, go1.22-openssl, go1.23-openssl, grafana, libgsf, pcp, pgadmin4, python310-pytest-html, python313, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (nano, python-urllib3, and xorg-server, xwayland).

Coker: The CUPS vulnerability

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/996108/

Debian Developer Russell Coker has written
up an analysis of the remote exploit of CUPS
announced in September:

He seems to have a different experience to me of reporting bugs, I
have had plenty of success getting bugs fixed without hyping them. I
just report the bug, wait a while, and it gets fixed. […] I
was quite confident that my systems wouldn’t be at any risk.

When it was published my opinion was proven to be correct, it
turned out to be a series of CUPS bugs.

Open Source Initiative announces Open Source AI Definition 1.0

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/996104/

The Open Source Initiative
(OSI) has announced
the release of version
1.0 of the Open Source AI Definition:

The OSAID offers a standard by which community-led, open and public
evaluations will be conducted to validate whether or not an AI system
can be deemed Open Source AI. This first stable version of the OSAID
is the result of multiple years of research and collaboration, an
international roadshow of workshops, and a year-long co-design process
led by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

LWN covered the
OSAID process, and final release candidate, on October 25.

[$] OSI readies controversial Open AI definition

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/995159/

The Open Source Initiative
(OSI) has been working on defining Open Source AI—that is what
constitutes an AI system that can be used, studied, modified, and
shared for any purpose—for almost two
years. Its board will
be voting on the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) on Sunday,
October 27, with the 1.0 version slated to be published on
October 28. It is never possible to please everyone in
such an endeavor, and it would be folly to make that a goal. However,
a number of prominent figures in the open-source community have voiced
concerns that OSI is setting the bar too low with the OSAID—which
will undo decades of community work to cajole vendors into adhering to
or respecting the original Open Source
Definition (OSD).

Tor Browser 14.0 released

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/995353/

Version
14.0 of the privacy-focused Tor browser has been released.

This is our first stable release based on Firefox
ESR 128, incorporating a year’s worth of changes shipped upstream
in Firefox. As part of this process we’ve also completed our annual
ESR transition audit, where we reviewed and addressed over 200 Bugzilla issues for changes in Firefox that
may negatively affect the privacy and security of Tor Browser
users. Our final reports from this audit are now available in the tor-browser-spec
repository on our Gitlab instance.

Kadlčík: Copr Modularity, the End of an Era

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/995337/

Jakub Kadlčík announced
on his blog that Fedora’s Copr build system will
be dropping support for building modules
(groups of RPM packages that are built, installed, and shipped
together) soon:

The Fedora Modularity project never really took off, and building
modules in Copr even less so. We’ve had only 14 builds in the last two
years. It’s not feasible to maintain the code for so few
users. Modularity has also been retired
since Fedora 39 and will die with RHEL 9.

Modularity features in Copr are now deprecated, and it will not be
possible to submit new module builds after April 2025. LWN covered some of the
problems with Fedora’s modularity initiative in 2019.

[$] Free-software foundations face fundraising problems

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/993665/

In July, at the GNOME annual general meeting (AGM),
held at GUADEC
2024,
the message from the GNOME Foundation board was that all was well,
financially speaking. Not great, but the foundation was on a
break-even budget and expected to go into its next fiscal year with a
similar budget and headcount. On October 7, however, the board announced
that it had had to make some cuts, including reducing its staff by
two people. This is not, however, strictly a GNOME problem: similar
organizations, such as the Python Software Foundation (PSF), KDE e.V.,
and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) are seeing declines in
fundraising while also being affected by inflation.

Introducing AlmaLinux OS Kitten (AlmaLinux Blog)

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/995140/

The AlmaLinux project has introduced a new edition called “Kitten”,
which will serve as “the direct upstream for AlmaLinux OS and is
the primary point for the AlmaLinux community to engage and influence
the future of AlmaLinux OS“. Not intended for production use, the
first release is based on CentOS Stream 10 source, which
will eventually be the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
10:

Because we anticipated many changes in 10, we wanted to get a head
start on building AlmaLinux OS 10. Earlier this year we started
setting up infrastructure and the build pipeline for AlmaLinux OS 10,
and started testing using CentOS Stream 10’s code. Based on this
preparation work, we are excited to share that we have successfully
built a preview of AlmaLinux OS 10 that we are calling AlmaLinux OS
Kitten 10.

The first Kitten release previews a number of ways that AlmaLinux will
diverge from RHEL 10, including re-enabling frame pointers,
including Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments
(SPICE), and adding packages for Firefox and Thunderbird, which have
been dropped from CentOS Stream 10 in favor of Flatpak versions. New
installation images for Kitten will be built quarterly. See the release
notes for download links, installation instructions, and more
information.

[$] Python PGP proposal poses packaging puzzles

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/993787/

Sigstore is a
project that is meant to simplify and improve the process of signing,
verifying, and protecting software. It is a relatively new project, declared
“generally available” in 2022. Python is an early adopter of sigstore; it started providing
signatures for CPython artifacts with Python 3.11
in 2022. This is in addition to the OpenPGP signatures it has been
providing since at
least 2001. Now, Seth Michael Larson—the Python Software
Foundation (PSF) security
developer-in-residence—would like to deprecate the PGP
signature and move to sigstore exclusively by next year. If that
happens, it will involve some changes in the way that Linux
distributions verify Python releases, since none of the major
distributions have processes for working with sigstore.

[$] A look at the aerc mail client

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/993498/

Email has become somewhat unfashionable as a collaboration tool for
open-source projects, but there are still a number of projects—such as
PostgreSQL and the Linux kernel—that expect contributors to send and
review patches via email. The aerc
mail client is aimed at developers looking for a text-based, efficient, and
extensible client that is meant to be used for working with Git and
email. It uses Vim-style keybindings by default, and has an interface
inspired by tmux that
lets users manage multiple accounts, mails, and embedded terminals at once.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/994436/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, and skopeo), Fedora (pdns-recursor and valkey), Mageia (unbound), Red Hat (fence-agents, firefox, java-11-openjdk, python-setuptools, python3-setuptools, resource-agents, and thunderbird), SUSE (etcd-for-k8s, libsonivox3, rubygem-puma, and unbound), and Ubuntu (apr, libarchive, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp,
linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, nano, and vim).