Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978837/

GhostBSD is a
desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD and the MATE Desktop Environment. The
goal of the project is to lower the barrier to entry of using FreeBSD
on a desktop or laptop system, and it largely succeeds at this. While it has a few rough edges
that make it hard to recommend for the average desktop user, it is
a fine choice for users who want a desktop with FreeBSD underpinnings
such as the Z File System (ZFS), and the Ports (source) and Packages (binary) software collections.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978463/

Philip Hazel was 51 when he began the Exim message transfer agent (MTA)
project in 1995, which
led to the Perl-Compatible Regular
Expressions (PRCE) project in 1998. At 80,
he’s maintained PCRE, and its successor PCRE2, for more than 27
years. For those doing the math, that’s a year longer than LWN has
been in publication. Exim maintenance was handed off around the time
of his retirement in 2007. Now, he is ready to hand off PCRE2 as well,
if a successor can be found.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978946/

Version
1.28 of the MATE Desktop
has been released.

MATE 1.28 has made significant strides in updating the codebase,
including the removal of deprecated libraries and ensuring
compatibility with the latest GTK versions. One of the most notable
improvements is the enhanced support for Wayland, bringing us closer
to a fully native MATE-Wayland experience. Several components have
been updated to work seamlessly with Wayland, ensuring a more
integrated and responsive desktop environment.

See the changelog
for a full list of improvements and bug fixes.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978939/

Version 1.11.0 of Libgcrypt, a general-purpose library of
cryptographic building blocks, has been released by the GnuPG project:

This release starts a new stable branch of Libgcrypt with full API and
ABI compatibility to the 1.10 series. Over the last years Jussi
Kivilinna put again a lot of work into speeding up the algorithms for
many commonly used CPUs. Niibe-san implemented new APIs and algorithms
and also integrated quantum-resistant encryption algorithms.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978907/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools, firefox, and flatpak), Debian (composer, roundcube, and thunderbird), Fedora (kitty and webkitgtk), Oracle (container-tools and flatpak), Red Hat (flatpak and java-1.8.0-ibm), SUSE (gdcm, gdk-pixbuf, libarchive, libzypp, zypper, ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, podman, python-Werkzeug, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (git, linux-hwe-6.5, mariadb, mariadb-10.6, and thunderbird).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978470/

Christian Schaller writes about AI and GPU-related features that are in flight and planned for Fedora 41.

Milan Crha has been working together with Alan Day and Jakub Steiner to come up with a streamlined user experience in GNOME Software to let you install the binary NVIDIA driver and provide you with an integrated graphical user interface help to sign the kernel module for use with secure boot. This is a bit different than what we for instance are doing in RHEL, where we are working with NVIDIA to provide pre-signed kernel modules, but that is a lot harder to do in Fedora due to the rapidly updating kernel versions and which most Fedora users appreciate as a big plus. So instead what we are for opting in Fedora is as I said to make it simple for you to self-sign the kernel module for use with secure boot. We are currently looking at when we can make this feature available, but no later than Fedora Workstation 41 for sure.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978465/

KDE developer Nate Graham has announced
a new set of KDE Human
Interface Guidelines (HIG) for the KDE project. Graham says that the goals
for the new HIGs were to reflect how KDE designs software today, make
the content 100% actionable, improve navigation, and to improve the
guidelines so people feel comfortable contributing:

Like any rewrite, there are bound to be rough edges and omissions
compared to the old version. Maybe I missed a piece of useful
information in the old HIG that had been buried somewhere but retained
some value. Maybe there’s low-hanging fruit for improvement. Help out
by contributing!

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/977987/

The openSUSE project recently announced
the second release candidate (RC2) of its Aeon Desktop, formerly known
as MicroOS Desktop GNOME. Aside from the new coat of naming paint,
Aeon breaks ground in a few other ways by dabbling with technologies not found in other openSUSE releases. The goal for Aeon is to provide
automated system updates using snapshots that can be applied
atomically, removing the burden of system maintenance for
“lazy developers” who want to focus on their work rather than desktop
administration. System-tinkerers need not apply.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978156/

The Cockpit project has
announced
the first release of Cockpit
Files, a plugin for Cockpit that allows file management on your server
via a web browser:

Cockpit Files was initially started by Google Summer of Code (GSoC)
student Mahmoud Hamdy
and is now under active development by the Cockpit team. The goal is
to replace the functionality of the cockpit-navigator
plugin from 45Drives and include automated testing per commit, a
standard PatternFly-based interface, and consistency with the rest of
Cockpit.

Development builds for Fedora are available via a
Copr repository, and packages are expected for Arch, Debian, and
Fedora. LWN covered the
Cockpit project in March.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/977762/

CentOS Linux 7 was first
released in July 2014, and is due to go end-of-life (EOL) on June 30.
By now, anyone who pays attention to such things is aware that Red Hat pulled the plug on
CentOS Linux in late 2020 to be replaced by CentOS Stream
instead. CentOS Linux 8
support was wound
down at the end of 2021 rather than in 2029 as originally stated.
CentOS Linux 7 was allowed to serve out its
full lifespan—but that EOL is approaching rapidly and
there’s no direct upgrade path. Users and organizations looking for a lifeline might want to consider
AlmaLinux’s ELevate
utility, which allows CentOS users to migrate to alternate enterprise
Linux (EL) operating systems.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978149/

The Python Software
Foundation (PSF) has announced
that nominations are open for the PSF Board election through June
25:

Who runs for the board? People who care about the Python community,
who want to see it flourish and grow, and also have a few hours a
month to attend regular meetings, serve on committees, participate in
conversations, and promote the Python community.

The PSF has a video about
serving on the board for those who might be interested. PSF members
can nominate themselves or another member. Candidates
will be announced on June 27. Voting begins on July 2 and will end on
July 16.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978139/

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced another round of stable kernel
updates: 6.9.4, 6.6.33, and 6.1.93 have been released. Each contains
another set of important fixes, users of these kernels are advised to
upgrade right away.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/978136/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (booth), Debian (cyrus-imapd and vlc), Fedora (firefox, libarchive, php, and singularity-ce), Oracle (ipa and ruby:3.3), Red Hat (389-ds-base, buildah, c-ares, cockpit, containernetworking-plugins, fence-agents, gdk-pixbuf2, gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, libreoffice, podman, protobuf-c, python-idna, rpm-ostree, ruby, and tomcat), Slackware (cups and mozilla), SUSE (bind, cups, iperf, kernel, nano, and poppler), and Ubuntu (libapache-mod-jk, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-aws, linux-oracle, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-nvidia, and mysql-8.0).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/976822/

Ladybird is an open-source
project aimed at building an independent web browser, rather than
yet another browser based on Chrome. It is written in C++ and licensed under a
two-clause BSD license. The effort
began as part of the SerenityOS project, but
developer Andreas Kling announced
on June 3 that he was “forking” Ladybird as a separate project and stepping away from
SerenityOS to focus his attention on the browser completely. Ladybird
is not ready to replace Firefox or Chrome for regular use, but it is showing
great promise.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/977303/

Version 2024.2 of the Kali Linux penetration testing distribution
has been released. This
release includes an update to GNOME
46, a high-resolution (HiDPI) mode for Xfce, as well as a number
of new packages such as the AutoRecon network
reconnaissance tool, pspy command-line utility for
snooping on Linux processes, and SploitScan tool for
fetching and displaying CVE information. Kali Linux is based on Debian
testing, and 2024.2 incorporates Debian’s work to transition to 64-bit
time_t to avoid year 2038 problems. Users with existing Kali
systems should be sure to follow the documentation
when upgrading.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/977285/

Version 14.1 of FreeBSD has
been released. This
is the second release of the 14.x stable branch. Highlights of this
release include upgrades to OpenZFS 2.2.4, Clang/LLVM 18.1.5, and
OpenSSH 9.7p1. FreeBSD 14.1 also features cloud-init support,
sound subsystem improvements, and more. See the
what’s
new blog post from the FreeBSD Foundation,
release
notes, and errata for
more information.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/976793/

Many years ago, the PostgreSQL project started holding regular CommitFests to
help tackle the work of reviewing and committing patches in a more
organized fashion. That has served the project well, but some in
the project are concerned that CommitFests are no longer meeting
the needs of PostgreSQL or its contributors. A lengthy discussion on the
pgsql-hackers mailing list turned up a number of complaints, a few
suggestions for improvement, but little consensus or momentum toward
a solution.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/977174/

Drew DeVault has published
an update about the state of the SourceHut software development
platform and its plans for the coming months. This is the first update
since the January post-mortem
following a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that resulted
in a prolonged
outage:

As you can imagine, it has been a stressful time for us. However, I
wish to stress that everything we’ve been dealing with is planned for
in our models, both technical and financial. There is no existential
threat to SourceHut. Nevertheless, we are grateful for your patience
and support.

[…] We have been focusing on two things this year: provisioning
and managing our infrastructure and getting as much rest as
possible. Our situation has calmed down, and while we still have a lot
of loose ends to attend to I’m happy to say that we’re resuming a
sense of normalcy here and preparing to resume our work on the
features you need.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/977233/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (deepin-qt5integration, deepin-qt5platform-plugins, dotnet8.0, dwayland, fcitx-qt5, fcitx5-qt, gammaray, kddockwidgets, keepassxc, kf5-akonadi-server, kf5-frameworkintegration, kf5-kwayland, plasma-integration, python-qt5, qadwaitadecorations, qgnomeplatform, qt5, qt5-qt3d, qt5-qtbase, qt5-qtcharts, qt5-qtconnectivity, qt5-qtdatavis3d, qt5-qtdeclarative, qt5-qtdoc, qt5-qtgamepad, qt5-qtgraphicaleffects, qt5-qtimageformats, qt5-qtlocation, qt5-qtmultimedia, qt5-qtnetworkauth, qt5-qtquickcontrols, qt5-qtquickcontrols2, qt5-qtremoteobjects, qt5-qtscript, qt5-qtscxml, qt5-qtsensors, qt5-qtserialbus, qt5-qtserialport, and qt5-qtspeech), Oracle (389-ds-base and ruby:3.1), Red Hat (389-ds-base, glibc, and kernel), SUSE (python-PyMySQL), and Ubuntu (libarchive).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/976826/

Version 2.4.0 of the LyX
document processor has been released. LyX is a “What You See Is What You
Mean” (WYSIWYM) application that offers GUI editing of LaTeX
documents with import and export to PDF, HTML, OpenDocument, Word, and
other formats. LyX 2.4.0 is the first major release in six years, and
brings support for EPUB, DocBook 5, improved
table styles, and now uses Unicode (utf8) as its default encoding. See
the full list of new
features on the LyX wiki, and release
notes for information on known issues and caveats for those
upgrading from earlier versions of LyX.