Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990270/

The GNOME Foundation has announced
that it is looking for a new Executive Director following the departure of Holly Million
in July:

As the cornerstone of our leadership team, the Executive Director will
play a critical role in shaping the strategic direction of the
Foundation, working closely with staff, community members, and
partners to expand our reach and impact. The ideal candidate will have
professional experience working with nonprofits, a strong passion for
open-source software, a deep commitment to our community values, and
the vision to drive the next phase of GNOME’s growth and development.

The window of opportunity for the job is closing quickly,
applications are due by September 20.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990264/

Germany’s Sovereign
Tech Fund (STF) has agreed to invest €688,800
to improve the security, stability, and functionality of Samba. The investment will take
place over three years and will be managed by SerNet, a company that
employs several Samba core developers and offers support for
Samba. According to its announcement,
work has already begun and is expected to complete in 2026:

The project’s focus is on areas like transparent failover, SMB3 UNIX
extensions, and modern security protocols such as SMB over QUIC. These
improvements are designed to ensure that Samba remains a robust and
secure solution for organizations that rely on a sovereign IT
infrastructure that is as independent as possible of proprietary
software regimes, but including optimal interoperability.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990202/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (haproxy, osc, and python3.11), Oracle (389-ds:1.4), Red Hat (kernel), SUSE (clamav, colord, kernel, postgresql16, and qemu), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia-6.8, and linux-xilinx-zynqmp).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990125/

Version
7.1.0 of the VirtualBox virtualization system has been
released. Changes include a major GUI update, a new Network Address
Translation (NAT) engine with IPv6 support, shared clipboard support on Wayland, and more.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/989055/

Debian does not have an official way to configure
networking. Instead, it has four
recommended ways to configure networking, one of which is the
venerable ifupdown, which
has been part of Debian since the turn of the century and is showing its
age. A conversation about its maintainability and possible replacement with ifupdown‑ng has
led to discussions about the default network-management tools for
Debian “trixie”
(Debian 13, which is expected in 2025) and beyond. No route to consensus
has been found, yet.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/989772/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds:1.4, dovecot, emacs, and glib2), Fedora (bluez, iwd, libell, linux-firmware, seamonkey, vim, and wireshark), Mageia (apr, libtiff, Nginx, openssl, orc, unbound, webmin, and zziplib), Red Hat (389-ds:1.4), and SUSE (containerd, curl, go1.22, go1.23, gstreamer-plugins-bad, kernel, ntpd-rs, python-Django, and python311).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/989660/

Version
3.4 of the Pandoc
document-conversion tool has been released. Notable changes in this
release include a new ANSI output format (for console output), a switch to WeasyPrint as the PDF engine for
HTML to PDF conversion, the ability to position captions
above or below tables and figures, and much more.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/989517/

Version
0.9.0 of Redox OS,
an open-source, Unix-like operating system written in
Rust, has been released. Notable changes in this release include
performance and stability improvements, better management of physical
and virtual memory, bootloader improvements, and more. It also brings
support for RustPython, Perl 5, Simple HTTP Server, the addition of
several applications including GNU Nano, Helix, and the COSMIC
Files, Editor, and Terminal applications. See the changelog
section of the announcement for a full list of changes in the release.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/987319/

Code review is in high demand, and short supply, for most open-source projects.
Reviewer time is precious, so any tool that can lighten the load is worth exploring.
That is why Jesse Brandeburg and Kamel Ayari decided to test whether
tools like ChatGPT could review patches to provide quick feedback to
contributors about common problems. In a
talk at the Netdev 0x18 conference this July, Brandeburg provided an overview of an
experiment using machine learning to review emails containing patches
sent to the netdev
mailing list. Large-language models (LLMs) will not be replacing human reviewers anytime
soon, but they may be a useful addition to help humans focus on deeper
reviews instead of simple rule violations.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/989229/

The NGINX team has announced
that official NGINX open-source development has moved away from
Mercurial to GitHub, and
the project will now be taking contributions
in the form of pull requests:

Additionally, starting today, we will begin accepting bugs reports,
feature requests and enhancements directly through GitHub, under the
“Issues” tab. Moreover, we’ve moved our community forums to the GitHub
“Discussions” area, where you will now be able
to engage in conversation, ask, and answer questions.

[…] We understand that changes like these may require adjustment,
so to give you more time, we will continue accepting patches and
provide community support via mailing lists until December 31st, 2024.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/988837/

Version 4.0 of the Tellico collection management
software has been released. This is the first release to use the
KDE Frameworks 6 and Qt6 libraries, with a fallback
available for Frameworks 5 and Qt5. Other notable changes in 4.0
include importing video collections from file metadata and correctly
importing multi-disc album data from Discogs, MusicBrainz, and iTunes. Users
of prior versions are advised to make a backup of their data before upgrading.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/988747/

The 6.10.8, 6.6.49, 6.1.108, 5.15.166, 5.10.225, 5.4.283, and 4.19.321 stable kernel updates have all
been released. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the
tree. Users of those kernels should upgrade.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/988746/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, gvisor-tap-vsock, nodejs:18, python-urllib3, and skopeo), Debian (firefox-esr and openssl), Fedora (apr and seamonkey), Red Hat (podman), Slackware (mozilla and seamonkey), SUSE (bubblewrap and flatpak, buildah, docker, dovecot23, ffmpeg, frr, go1.21-openssl, graphviz, java-1_8_0-openj9, kubernetes1.26, kubernetes1.27, kubernetes1.28, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-3, perl-DBI, python-aiohttp, python-Django, python-WebOb, thunderbird, tiff, ucode-intel, unbound, webkit2gtk3, and xen), and Ubuntu (drupal7 and twisted).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/988607/

Version
130.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Notable in this
release is the addition of a Firefox Labs tab in Firefox
Settings. This allows users to easily enable experimental features,
such as the ability to translate selected text portions to different
languages after a full-page translation, and add
an AI chatbot to the sidebar. Firefox 130 also addresses several
security issues, adds 11 new languages to its translation support,
and more.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/987315/

One of the joys of writing about technology is the opportunity to
cover interesting talks on open‑source and free‑software topics. One
of the pains is creating transcriptions of said talks, or continually
referring back to a recording, to be able to write about
them. Speech Note is an
open-source application that uses machine-learning models, running locally, to
translate speech to text and take the pain out of transcription. It
also handles text to speech, and language translations. While not
perfect, its transcriptions are better than one might expect, even when
handling jargon, accents, and less-than-perfect audio.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/987176/

At this year’s GUADEC in Denver, Colorado, Behdad Esfahbod and Matthias Clasen
presented a two-part talk on a topic that’s deeply important to desktop
environments: fonts. Esfahbod covered advances in font
technology that are making their way to becoming standards, and Clasen briefly
discussed improvements in GTK text rendering. The talk presented some
fascinating insights into the problems around accurately rendering
writing systems on the desktop, and where font technologies may be
going in the near future.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/987892/

Reading an established open-source project’s developer mailing list
may leave new contributors wishing they had a decoder ring. Greg
Sabino Mullane has written up a valuable explainer
for those new to the PostgreSQL hackers (pgsql-hackers)
mailing list that may also be useful for decoding other lists as well:

The mailing lists are full of acronyms and jargon that might not be
familiar to younger people who did not grow up on email (although text
messages have inherited many of the abbreviations). If you are a
non-native English speaker, or under the age of 30, or not steeped in
the world of tech, I offer some solutions below.

To do this, I downloaded the last year’s worth of hackers email,
wrote a program to strip out all the non-human stuff (headers, code
blocks, attachments, etc.), and then did some data analysis on the
results.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/987836/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libvpx, postgresql, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Debian (chromium and ghostscript), Fedora (python3.13), and SUSE (chromium and podman).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/987715/

The KDE project plans to directly
ask for donations in the Plasma desktop starting with version
6.2. According to this
blog post by Nate Graham, users will see a
system notification once per year (in December) asking for a
donation to the non-profit KDE e.V.:

Now, I know that messages like this can be controversial! The
change was carefully considered, and we tried our best to minimize
the annoying-ness factor: It’s small and unobtrusive, and no matter
what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it’ll go away
until next year. It’s implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module,
which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they
like.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/987700/

Version 5.0.0 of GNU Screen has
been released. Notable changes in this release include
new commands for authentication, input into multiple windows at the
same time, and to turn on/off truecolor support.