Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/986480/

Achieving consensus among Debian Developers on technical topics and
procedures can be, to put it mildly, challenging. Nevertheless, that
is exactly what Otto Kekäläinen has tried to do with a proposal that
would set up “principles all Debian packages should follow to be
open for collaboration in package maintenance“. In the near term,
it seems unlikely that the proposal will be accepted, but the
discussion may be effective at improving collaboration nonetheless.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/987519/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (calibre, dotnet8.0, dovecot, webkit2gtk4.0, and webkitgtk), Oracle (nodejs:20), Red Hat (bind, bind and bind-dyndb-ldap, postgresql:16, and squid), Slackware (kcron and plasma), SUSE (keepalived and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (drupal7).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/987414/

KDE developer Carl Schwan has announced
the release of Calligra Office
version 4.0. The most significant changes in this release include a “major
overhaul” of the office suite’s user interface, and a transition to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/987406/

Nominations are now
open for people interested in joining the Ubuntu
Community Council, “the highest governance body of the Ubuntu
project“. Any Ubuntu Member can
apply from now until Sunday, September 22 at 23:59 UTC.

The Ubuntu project turned 20 this year, but is still in constant
flux. The advent of new communication platforms, new projects under
our umbrella, and the ever-growing popularity of the project requires
our community to evolve. We need to make sure Ubuntu is set to tackle
the challenges of the next 20 years. It needs a strong and active
community council to guide the project forwards.

See Merlijn Sebrechts’s blog
post, “A year in the Ubuntu community council”, for an overview of
what it’s like to serve on the council.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/987311/

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that Germany’s Sovereign Tech
Fund (STF) has agreed to invest €686,400 toward improvements in the
FreeBSD project’s infrastructure, security, regulatory compliance, and
developer experience:

The work commissioned by STF also aligns closely with the recent
August
9, 2024 summary report released by the U.S. Office of the
National Cyber Director (ONCD), consolidating feedback from the 2023
request for information on key priorities for securing the open source
software ecosystem. By enhancing security controls and SBOM tooling,
the FreeBSD Foundation is helping to keep FreeBSD at the forefront of
improved vulnerability disclosure mechanisms and secure software
foundations.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/986659/

Ars Technica covers
a recent update
that is causing problems for users with systems that dual-boot Windows
and Linux.

“Note that Windows says this update won’t apply to systems that
dual-boot Windows and Linux,” one frustrated person wrote. “This
obviously isn’t true, and likely depends on your system configuration
and the distribution being run. It appears to have made some linux efi
shim bootloaders incompatible with microcrap efi bootloaders (that’s
why shifting from MS efi to ‘other OS’ in efi setup works). It appears
that Mint has a shim version that MS SBAT doesn’t recognize.”

The reports indicate that multiple distributions, including Debian,
Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, and Puppy Linux, are all
affected. Microsoft has yet to acknowledge the error publicly, explain
how it wasn’t detected during testing, or provide technical guidance
to those affected. Company representatives didn’t respond to an email
seeking answers.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/986655/

Gentoo developer Michał Górny has written a lengthy blog
post that explains how Gentoo approaches releases:

Gentoo is something of a hybrid, as it combines the best of both
worlds. It is a rolling release distribution with a single shared
repository that is available to all users. However, within this
repository we use a keywording system to provide a choice between
stable and testing packages, to facilitate both production and
development systems (with some extra flexibility), and versioned
profiles to tackle major lock-step upgrades.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/974969/

Linux installers receive a disproportionate amount of attention
compared to the amount of time that most users spend with them. Ideally,
a user spends only a few minutes using the installer, versus years using
the distribution after it is installed. Yet, the installer sets the
first impression, and if it fails to do its job, little else matters.
Installers also have to continually evolve to keep pace with new
hardware, changes in distribution packaging (such as image-based Linux
distributions), and so forth. Along those lines, the SUSE team that maintains the
venerable YaST installer has
decided it’s time to start (almost) fresh with a new Linux installer
project, called Agama,
for new projects. YaST is not going away as an administration tool,
but it is likely to be relieved of installer duties at some point.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/986628/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (aom, cinder, dovecot, glance, and nova), Fedora (mysql8.0), Oracle (curl and libreoffice), SUSE (oniguruma, openssl-1_0_0, openssl1, and xen), and Ubuntu (cacti, curl, exfatprogs, firefox, and vim).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/986528/

Version 0.3.0 of the uv
Python package and project manager has been released. Introduced in
February, uv is written in Rust and aims to be “Cargo for
Python“. Notable changes in this release include the addition of
interfaces for managing projects, installing
Python, running scripts,
and new documentation. See the
accompanying blog post for more information.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/985210/

The FreeBSD Project is, for the second
time this year, engaging in a long-running discussion about the
possibility of including Rust in its base
system. The sequel to the first discussion included some work by
Alan Somers to show what it might look like to use Rust code in the
base tree. Support for Rust code does not appear much closer to being
included in FreeBSD’s base system, but the conversation has been
enlightening.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/986030/

The Gentoo Linux project has
announced
that it is dropping support for Itanium:

Following the removal of IA-64 (Itanium)
support in the Linux kernel
and glibc,
and subsequent discussions on our mailing list, as well as
a vote by the Gentoo Council, Gentoo will discontinue all ia64
profiles and keywords. The primary reason for this decision is the
inability of the Gentoo IA-64 team to support this architecture
without kernel support, glibc support, and a functional development
box (or even a well-established emulator). In addition, there have
been only very few users interested in this type of hardware.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/984502/

Markdown editors are a dime a dozen. Cheaper than that, actually,
since many of them are open‑source software. Despite the sheer number of
options, finding an editor that has all of the features that one might want can
be tricky. For some users, Zettlr
might the right tool. It is a What You See is What You
Mean (WYSIWYM) editor that stores its work locally as plain Markdown
files. The project is billed as a “one-stop publication
workbench“, and is suitable for writing anything from blog posts to
academic papers, maintaining a personal journal, or keeping notes in a Zettlekasten. It
is simple to get started with, but rewards deeper exploration and
customization.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/984638/

Linux hardware vendor System76 started promoting
its work on a Rust-based, Wayland
desktop environment for its Pop!_OS
Ubuntu-derivative distribution almost two years
ago. On August 8, the company released an alpha version of the COSMIC desktop environment for
users to test out. While it has rough edges and missing features, it
is stable enough to get a good feel for what the finished product has
in store—and the initial results are promising.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/985350/

Version 4.0 of the Magit text-based
Git user interface for Emacs has been released. Changes since the 3.3.0
release include the addition of context menus, a makeover for the
menu-bar menu, new menu commands, and many other new features and bug
fixes. See the release
notes for full details.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/984702/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, openjdk-17, and wpa), Gentoo (aiohttp, Bitcoin, Cairo, Go, json-c, Levenshtein, libXpm, nghttp2, PostgreSQL, and Redis), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, python-setuptools, python-urllib3, python3.11-setuptools, and wget), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (bind, curl, docker, ffmpeg, ffmpeg-4, kernel, kernel-firmware, libnbd, patch, shadow, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (python-django and wpa).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/984249/

The Business
Source License (BUSL) is a source-available license that “converts”
to an open-source license after a period of time. In theory, this
means that a few years after a version of a product is released under
the BUSL, it becomes open source and is fair game for Linux
distributions to package along with regular open-source projects. In
practice, the license throws a few curveballs that require special
consideration and caution, as the Fedora Project recently discussed.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/984448/

The 6.10.3, 6.6.44, and 6.1.103 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/984266/

The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has announced
a fellowship program to support “the dedicated individuals who keep
our digital infrastructure running“:

Over the past two years, STF has successfully contracted over 40 FOSS
projects, enhancing their technical sustainability through targeted
milestones. However, the activities of maintainers, who often work on
multiple FOSS projects, are hard to quantify for funding applications,
as the demands and challenges vary and can change quickly. This is
where the fellowship for maintainers comes into play.

According to the fellowship
page the STF plans to fund five fellowships, beginning in the
fourth quarter of this year, for a period of 12 months.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/984213/

We have received the
sad news that Dr. Mel Chua has passed away. Mel was probably best
known in the free-software community as a contributor to the Fedora
Project in its early days. The Fedora Community blog honored
Mel recently after she had moved to hospice care with tributes
from several Fedorans. Stephen Jacobs wrote:

I can’t find the words to express how much of a positive impact Mel
has had on my work, our shared work, my family, the experiences of my
students, and the world of FOSS writ large. Nor can I find the words
to convey just how much I will miss her.

Mel will be greatly missed.