All posts by jzb

Linux Mint 22 “Wilma” released

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/983301/

Linux Mint has announced version 22 of
the distribution in three editions: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. Mint 22
is based on Ubuntu 24.04 and uses kernel version 6.8.0:

Linux Mint 22 is a long term support release which will be supported
until 2029. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and
many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

LWN covered the
Linux Mint 22 beta in early July. See the new
features page and release notes for
more information on this release.

OpenSSL announces new governance structure

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/983120/

OpenSSL has announced
that it has adopted a new governance framework:

The OpenSSL Management Committee (OMC) has been dissolved, and two
boards of directors have been elected for the Foundation and the Corporation. Each
organization has ten voting members. These boards share all the
responsibilities and authorities of the former OMC co-equally.

To further engage our communities, we are establishing two advisory
committees for each entity: a Business Advisory Committee (BAC) and a
Technical Advisory Committee (TAC). The communities will elect the
members of the BACs and TACs, creating a direct channel for community
input in roadmap development and reflecting the diverse perspectives
of OpenSSL’s communities.

OpenSSL has also announced that two projects have adopted the OpenSSL Mission
and become OpenSSL
projects: Bouncy Castle, which provides
cryptographic APIs for Java and C#, and the cryptlib security
software development toolkit. See the announcement for full details.

[$] Lessons from the death and rebirth of Thunderbird

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/982610/

Ryan Sipes told the audience during his keynote at
GUADEC 2024 in Denver, Colorado that the Thunderbird mail client
“probably shouldn’t still be alive”. Thunderbird, however, is not only
alive—it is arguably in better shape than ever
before. According to Sipes, the project’s turnaround is a result of
governance, storytelling, and learning to be comfortable asking users
for money. He would also like it quite a bit if Linux distributions stopped
turning off telemetry.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/983083/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (ghostscript and xmedcon), Gentoo (Dmidecode, ExifTool, and Freenet), Red Hat (containernetworking-plugins, cups, edk2, httpd, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, krb5, libreoffice, libuv, libvirt, linux-firmware, nghttp2, nodejs, openssh, python3, runc, thunderbird, and tpm2-tss), Slackware (aaa_glibc, bind, and mozilla), SUSE (postgresql14, python-sentry-sdk, and shadow), and Ubuntu (activemq, bind9, haproxy, nova, provd, python-zipp, squid, squid3, and tomcat).

Improvements to the PSF Grants program

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/982967/

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) board has announced
improvements to its grants program that have been enacted as a
response to “concerns and frustrations” with the program:

The PSF Board takes the open letter from the pan-African delegation
seriously, and we began to draft a plan to address everything in the
letter. We also set up improved two-way communications so that we can
continue the conversation with the community. The writers of the open
letter have now met several times with members of the PSF board. We
are thankful for their insight and guidance on how we can work
together and be thoroughly and consistently supportive of the
pan-African Python community.

So far the PSF has set up office
hours to improve communications, published
a retrospective on the DjangoCon Africa review, and put out a transparency
report on grants from the past two years. The PSF board has also
voted to “use the same criteria for all grant requests, no matter
their country of origin“.

[$] “Opt-in” metrics planned for Fedora Workstation 42

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/980598/

Red Hat, through members of the Fedora
Workstation Working Group, has taken another
swing at persuading the Fedora Project to allow metrics related to
the real-world use of the Workstation edition to be collected. The first
proposal, aimed for Fedora 40, was withdrawn to be reworked
based on feedback. This time around, the proponents have shifted from
asking for opt-out telemetry to opt-in metrics, with more detail about
what would be collected and the policies that would govern data collection. The
change seems to be on its way to approval by the Fedora Engineering
Steering Council (FESCo) and is set to take effect for
Fedora 42.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/982270/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel), Fedora (golang and krb5), Red Hat (cups, firefox, git, java-21-openjdk, kernel, linux-firmware, nghttp2, nodejs, and podman), SUSE (libndp, nodejs18, nodejs20, tomcat, and xen), and Ubuntu (gtk+2.0, gtk+3.0 and linux-hwe-5.4, linux-oracle-5.4).

[$] SUSE asks openSUSE to consider name change

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/981018/

SUSE has, in a somewhat clumsy
fashion, asked openSUSE
to consider rebranding to clear up confusion over the
relationship between SUSE the company and openSUSE as a community
project. That, in turn, has opened conversations about revising
openSUSE governance and more. So far, there is no concrete proposal to
consider, no timeline, or even a process for the community and company
to follow to make any decisions.

GNOME Foundation Announces Transition of Executive Director

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/981850/

The GNOME Foundation has announced
that executive director Holly Million is stepping down at the end of
July, and will be replaced by Richard Littauer as interim executive
director:

On behalf of the whole GNOME community, the Board of Directors
would like to give our utmost thanks to Holly for her achievements
during the past 10 months, including drafting a bold five-year
strategic plan for the Foundation, securing two important fiscal
sponsorship agreements with GIMP and Black Python Devs, writing our
first funding proposal that will now enable the Foundation to apply
for more grants, vastly improving our financial operations, and
implementing a break-even budget to preserve our financial
reserves.

The Foundation’s Interim Executive Director, Richard Littauer,
brings years of open source leadership as part of his work as an
organizer of SustainOSS and CURIOSS, as a sustainability coordinator
at the Open Source Initiative, and as a community development manager
at Open Source Collective, and through open source contributions to
many projects, such as Node.js and IPFS. The Board appointed Richard
in June and is confident in his ability to guide the Foundation during
this transitional period.

Million says she is leaving to pursue a PhD in psychology. The
board plans to announce its search plan for a permanent executive
directory after GUADEC, which takes
place July 19 through 24.

[$] A look at Linux Mint 22

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.

Brown: Fixing a 6-year-old bug in Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu

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.

Fix for Fedora Atomic Desktop and Fedora IoT boot failure

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.

Security updates for Wednesday

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).

[$] Giving bootloaders the boot with nmbl

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.

[$] Debian debate over tag2upload reaches compromise

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.

Universal Blue images need manual intervention for updates

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.