Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/981130/

Linux Mint has released a beta of its
next long-term-support (LTS) release, Linux Mint 22 (code-named “Wilma”), based on Ubuntu 24.04. Aside from the standard
software updates that come with any major upgrade, some of Wilma’s
largest selling points are what it doesn’t have; namely snap
packages or GNOME applications that have broken theming on non-GNOME
desktops like Mint’s Cinnamon desktop.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/981565/

Doug Brown documents
the long journey to fixing a bug in the GDebi utility for
installing Debian packages. He first encountered the bug in
Ubuntu MATE 18.04: “at the time I just ignored this
issue. I didn’t want to deal with it. I went off to the trusty Linux
terminal and installed Chrome that way instead“.

Two and a half years ago, I committed to doing more open-source
contributions in my free time and was finally irritated enough about
this problem to look into it. I searched around for more info. Lo and
behold, lots
of people
were also
affected and there was already an
issue from 2019 on Ubuntu’s bug tracker about it.

[…] As is commonly the case in software development, the difficult part of
this fix had nothing to do with the code itself. All of my effort was
spent figuring out Ubuntu’s patch submission processes and advocating
for my merge request. Nobody else seemed to be interested in doing the
work to actually fix this bug that has been plaguing Ubuntu MATE and
Xubuntu, not to mention some Debian users, for over 6 years. After
dealing with the long process of getting my merge request approved, I
think I’m starting to understand why!

Brown notes that the fix is
now packaged for the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release, and should be
backported to 22.04 and 24.04 eventually.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/981561/

Fedora Atomic Desktop
and Fedora IoT systems installed
before Fedora 40 may fail to boot after an update if secure boot
is enabled. Fedora Magazine has a
post by Timothée Ravier about the problem, how users can work
around it, and what the project is doing to avoid the similar problems
in the future:

On Fedora Atomic Desktops and Fedora IoT systems, the components
that are part of the boot chain (Shim, GRUB) are not (yet)
automatically updated alongside the rest of the system. Thus, if you
have installed a Fedora Atomic Desktop or a Fedora IoT system before
Fedora 40, it uses an old versions of the Shim and bootloader binaries
to boot your system.

When Secure Boot is enabled, the EFI firmware loads Shim
first. Shim is signed by the Microsoft Third Party Certificate
Authority so that it can be verified on most hardware out of the
box. The Shim binary includes the Fedora certificates used to verify
binaries signed by Fedora. Then Shim loads GRUB, which in turn loads
the Linux kernel. Both are signed by Fedora.

Until recently, the kernel binaries where signed two times, with an
older key and a newer one. With the 6.9 kernel update, the kernel is
no longer signed with the old key. If GRUB or Shim is old enough and
does not know about the new key, the signature verification fails.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/981508/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel-rt, libreswan, linux-firmware, pki-core, and podman), Fedora (firefox and jpegxl), Gentoo (Buildah, HarfBuzz, and LIVE555 Media Server), Oracle (buildah, gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel, libreswan, and podman), Red Hat (containernetworking-plugins, dotnet6.0, dotnet8.0, fence-agents, kernel, libreswan, libvirt, perl-HTTP-Tiny, python39:3.9, toolbox, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel modules), SUSE (firefox, freeradius-server, haproxy, jbigkit, kernel, kernel-firmware, pam, ppp, python3-cryptography, skopeo, and tar), and Ubuntu (dotnet6, dotnet8, exim4, firefox, golang-1.21, golang-1.22, openssh, and python-django).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979789/

At DevConf.cz 2024,
Marta Lewandowska gave a talk to discuss a
new approach for booting Linux systems, “No more boot
loader: Please use the kernel instead“. The talk, available on
YouTube, introduced a new project called nmbl (for “no more bootloader”,
pronounced “nimble”). The idea is to get rid of bootloaders (e.g.,
GNU GRUB) with a
Unified
Kernel Image (UKI) that removes the need for a separate bootloader
altogether. It is early days for nmbl, currently the project is only
being tested for use with virtual machines, but the idea is
compelling. If successful, nmbl could offer security, performance, and
maintenance benefits compared to GRUB and other separate bootloaders.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978324/

Debian’s proposed tag2upload
service would be worthy of an article
even if it wasn’t so contentious; tag2upload promises a
streamlined way for Debian developers using Git to upload packages to
the Debian
Archive. But tag2upload has been in limbo for
years due to disagreement and a communication breakdown between the team
behind tag2upload and the ftpmasters team. It took the
threat of a General
Resolution (GR), weeks of discussion, and more than
1,000 emails to finally move forward.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/980575/

The Universal Blue
project, which produces operating system images based on Fedora’s Atomic Desktops,
has issued an announcement
that manual steps are required to continue receiving updates. Jorge
Castro wrote:

If you use Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora, or any other Universal Blue
image (including our toolboxes) then you need to follow the
instructions in this announcement in order to ensure that your device
is getting updates. We were rotating our cosign keypairs this morning,
which is the method that we use to sign our images.

During this process I made a critical error which has resulted in
forcing you to take manual steps to migrate to our newly signed
images.

This applies to all Universal Blue images released before July 2,
2024. See the full announcement for instructions. LWN covered Bluefin in
December, 2023.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/980555/

Version 4.10.0 of GNU findutils has been released. Notable changes
include allowing find -name / as a valid
pattern, and accepting larger UIDs/GIDs for find -user and
find -group. It is also once again possible to build
findutils on systems with musl-libc.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/980554/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (golang and kernel), Fedora (ghostscript and openssh), Mageia (espeak-ng), Red Hat (389-ds, c-ares, container-tools, cups, fontforge, go-toolset, iperf3, less, libreoffice, libuv, linux-firmware, nghttp2, openldap, pki-core, python-idna, python-jinja2, python-pillow, python3, python3.11-PyMySQL, qemu-kvm, and xmlrpc-c), SUSE (ghostscript, git, libndp, libxml2, openssh, pgadmin4, podman, podofo, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, python39, squid, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (firefox and openvpn).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979780/

FreeDOS is an open-source
operating system designed to be compatible with the now-defunct MS-DOS. Three decades
have now passed since the FreeDOS project was first announced, and it
is still alive and well with a small community of developers and
users committed to running legacy DOS software, classic DOS games, and
developing modern applications that extend its functionality well beyond the
original MS-DOS. It may well be around in another 30 years.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979935/

The FreeBSD Foundation has published
a
set of reports from the May
2024 FreeBSD Developer Summit held in Ottawa, Canada. The topics
include FreeBSD Core Team updates, FreeBSD 15 release planning,
Integration with Rust, and OCI
containers on FreeBSD:

Doug Rabson began by providing an overview of the current state of
FreeBSD support for OCI containers, noting that while FreeBSD has long
supported containers through its jail and vnet features, the ecosystem
around OCI containers requires further development. “FreeBSD has been
able to do containers for a long time, but we need to align better
with OCI standards to make our containers more compatible and easier
to use,” Rabson remarked​​.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979918/

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced
the addition of three new members to its board: John Gilmore,
Christina Haralanova, and Maria Chiara Pievatolo. This is part of FSF
governance changes announced
in January 2023. The next step is a review of current board
members:

These three new members of the FSF’s board of directors are the first
to be appointed since 2020, when Odile Bénassy joined. Given the
importance of the FSF to the free software movement, and the
importance of its board to ensure preservation of the software freedom
definition, the board has not taken its task lightly. Next, the FSF
will evaluate current board members with the FSF’s associate members
in August, after which the voting
members will review the feedback
received and decide if each current board member should remain.

More information on the process, and a short biography of each new
board member, is available in the full announcement.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979671/

An upgrade from Python 3.11 to 3.12 has led to the rejection of
some Python apps by Apple’s app stores. That led to Eric Froemling submitting a bug report
against CPython. That, in turn, led to an interesting
discussion among Python developers about how far the project was
willing to go to accommodate app store review processes. Developers
reached a quick consensus, and a solution that may arrive as soon as
Python 3.13.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979849/

The 6.9.7, 6.6.36, and 6.1.96 stable kernel updates have been
released; each contains an important set of fixes.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979847/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, kernel, libvpx, and linux-5.10), Fedora (chromium, firefox, freeipa, moodle, and openvpn), Oracle (git), Red Hat (golang and java-1.8.0-ibm), and Ubuntu (linux-oracle-6.5, netplan.io, openssl, plasma-workspace, ruby2.7, ruby3.0, ruby3.1, sqlite3, and wget).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979748/

The openSUSE project has announced
Leap Micro version
6.0. Leap Micro is an image-based, lightweight Linux distribution
that is designed to run containerized and virtualized applications. It
is based on SUSE Linux
Enterprise (SLE) Micro. Changes in this release include the
support for full-disk encryption, the addition of Cockpit for
web-based system management, and an optional real-time kernel for
x86_64. Boot support for legacy BIOS on x86_64 is deprecated with 6.0, and will be removed in a later release. See the SLE
Micro release notes for more information.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979745/

Peter Hutterer has written
a summary of “papercut fixes” for GNOME tablet support that are
planned to ship with GNOME 47.

If you’re an avid tablet user, you may have multiple stylus tools –
but it’s also likely that you have multiple tools of the same type
which makes differentiating them in the GUI hard. Which is why they’re
highlighted now – if you bring the tool into proximity, the matching
image is highlighted to make it easier to know which stylus you’re
about to configure. Oh, and in the process we added a new SVG for AES
styli too to make the picture look more like the actual physical
tool. The <blink> tag may no longer be cool but at least we can disco
our way through the stylus configuration now.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979740/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (git, python3.11, and python3.9), Debian (chromium, emacs, git, linux-5.10, and org-mode), Fedora (libopenmpt, nginx-mod-modsecurity, and thunderbird), Mageia (emacs, python-ansible-core, and python-authlib), Oracle (git, python3.11, and python3.9), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and samba), and Ubuntu (ansible, cups, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, libheif, openvpn, roundcube, and salt).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979666/

Version
4.8.0 of the darktable
photo editor has been released. Changes include performance
improvements for large collections, addition of more EXIF fields in
the image information module, and two new modules for image
composition: Enlarge Canvas and Overlay. Enlarge Canvas allows adding
areas to an image, while Overlay allows adding new content by
overlaying pixels from the current image or another image. LWN last
looked at darktable in
2022. Users are “strongly advised” to make a backup of their
configuration and library before upgrading, as they will not be
compatible with darktable 4.6.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/979182/

Dan Walsh, Stef Walter, and Colin Walters all walk into a
presentation and Walter asks, “why would
you want to boot your containers?” This isn’t the setup for some technology joke, this is part of the trio’s
keynote at
DevConf.cz in Brno, Czech Republic on June 14 about bootable containers
(bootc). The talk, which was streamed to YouTube for those of us who
didn’t attend DevConf.cz in person, provided a solid overview of bootc
and the problems it is intended to solve. The idea behind bootc is to
make creating operating-system images just as easy as creating
application-container images while using the same tools.