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The Amarok music player project has announced the release of version 3.0, which is codenamed "Castaway". It is the first stable version using Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, and the first stable release since the final Qt-4-based 2.9.0 in 2018. The road to 3.0 has not been a short one. Much of the Qt5/KF5 porting was done in 2015 already, but finishing and polishing everything up has...

On April 21, a group of anonymous authors and non-anonymous signatories published a lengthy open letter to the Nix community and Nix founder Eelco Dolstra calling for his resignation from the project. They claimed ongoing problems with the project's leadership, primarily focusing on the way his actions have allegedly undermined people nominally empowered to perform various moderation and governance tasks. Since its release, the...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, java-11-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, libreswan, thunderbird, and tigervnc), Debian (chromium, emacs, frr, mediawiki, ruby-rack, trafficserver, and zabbix), Fedora (chromium, grub2, python-idna, and python-reportlab), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, firefox, opencryptoki, and thunderbird), Red Hat (container-tools:4.0, container-tools:rhel8, git-lfs, and shim), SUSE (frr, java-11-openjdk, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kernel, pdns-recursor, and shim), and Ubuntu (apache2, cpio, curl, glibc, gnutls28, less, libvirt, and pillow).

Robert McQueen has posted a message from the GNOME Foundation board describing the current financial situation, plans to improve it, and an increase in the size of the board. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we...

The 6.9-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Things continue to look pretty normal, and nothing here really stands out. The biggest single change that stands out in the diffstat is literally a documentation update, everything else looks pretty small and spread out.

The 6.8.8, 6.6.29, 6.1.88, and 5.15.157 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

At the CPU level, a memory model describes, among other things, the amount of freedom the processor has to reorder memory operations. If low-level code does not take the memory model into account, unpleasant surprises are likely to follow. Naturally, different CPUs offer different memory models, complicating the portability of certain types of concurrent software. To make life easier, some Arm CPUs offer the...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (knot-resolver, pdns-recursor, and putty), Fedora (xen), Mageia (editorconfig-core-c, glibc, mbedtls, webkit2, and wireshark), Oracle (buildah), Red Hat (buildah and yajl), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (dcmtk, openCryptoki, php7, php74, php8, python-gunicorn, python-idna, qemu, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (cryptojs, freerdp2, nghttp2, and zabbix).

On April 11, Brandt Bucher posted PEP 744 ("JIT Compilation"), which summarizes the current state of Python's new copy-and-patch just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The JIT is currently experimental, but the PEP proposes some criteria for the circumstances under which it should become a non-experimental part of Python. The discussion of the PEP hasn't reached a conclusion, but several members of the community have already raised...

Version 24.04 LTS of the Ubuntu distribution is out. This release continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, together with the community and our partners, to introduce new features and fix bugs. The list of changes and enhancements is long; click below...

Linux, famously, appears in a wide range of systems. While servers and large data centers get a lot of the attention, and this year will always be the year of the Linux desktop, there is also a great deal of Linux to be found in realtime and embedded applications. Two talks held in the realtime and embedded tracks of the 2024 Open Source Summit...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (curl, filezilla, flatpak, kubernetes, libfilezilla, thunderbird, and xen), Oracle (go-toolset:ol8, kernel, libreswan, shim, and tigervnc), Red Hat (buildah, gnutls, libreswan, tigervnc, and unbound), SUSE (cockpit-wicked, nrpe, and python-idna), and Ubuntu (dnsmasq, freerdp2, linux-azure-6.5, and thunderbird).

BleepingComputer reported on April 20 that some malware was being distributed via GitHub. Uploading files as part of a comment gives them a URL that appears to be associated with a repository, even if the comment is never posted. A GitHub flaw, or possibly a design decision, is being abused by threat actors to distribute malware using URLs associated with Microsoft repositories, making the...

On April 23, Mozilla announced that Firefox's crash reporter has been rewritten in Rust, allowing the project to address a backlog of issues. Even though it is important to properly handle main process crashes, the crash reporter hasn't received significant development in a while (aside from development to ensure that crash reports and telemetry continue to reliably be delivered)! It has long been stuck...

Version 9.0 of the QEMU emulator has been released. "This release contains 2700+ commits from 220 authors." The list of improvements is long; see the announcement and the changelog for details.

For several years, contributors to the Rust project have been working to improve support for asynchronous code. The benefits of these efforts are not confined to asynchronous code, however. Members of the Rust community have been working toward adding explicit existential types to Rust since 2017. Existential types are not a common feature of programming languages (something the RFC acknowledges), so the motivation for...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (abseil-cpp, chromium, filezilla, libfilezilla, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Oracle (firefox, gnutls, golang, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, libreswan, mod_http2, owO: thunderbird, and thunderbird), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, gnutls, grub2, kernel, kernel-rt, less, linux-firmware, opencryptoki, pcs, postgresql-jdbc, and thunderbird), Slackware (ruby), SUSE (kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, and opensc), and Ubuntu (firefox, linux-azure, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia, and ruby-sanitize).

The long-running effort to complete the work on stacking (or composing) the Linux security modules (LSMs) recently encountered a barrier—in the form of a "suggestion" to discontinue it from Linus Torvalds. His complaint revolved around the indirect function calls that are used to implement LSMs, but he also did not think much of the effort to switch away from those calls. While it does...

The Fedora 40 distribution has been released. See the "what's new" pages for Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE to learn more about the desktop spins, along with this LWN article, for more information.

The Rust programming language, it is hoped, will bring a new level of safety to the Linux kernel. At the moment, though, there are still a number of impediments to getting useful Rust code into the kernel. In the Embedded Open Source Summit track of the Open Source Summit North America, Fabien Parent provided an overview of his work aimed at improving the infrastructure...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (glibc and samba), Fedora (chromium, cjson, mingw-python-idna, and pgadmin4), Mageia (kernel, kmod-xtables-addons, kmod-virtualbox, kernel-linus, and perl-Clipboard), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, java-11-openjdk, kpatch-patch, and shim), Slackware (freerdp), SUSE (apache-commons-configuration, glibc, jasper, polkit, and qemu), and Ubuntu (google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.5, pillow, and squid).

The Open Home Foundation has announced its existence as a home and support resource for free home-automation projects. We created the Open Home Foundation to fight for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. And every person who lives in one. Ahead of today, we've transferred over 240 projects, standards, drivers, and libraries—Home Assistant, ESPHome, Zigpy, Piper, Improv Wi-Fi, Wyoming,...

The Debian project leader election results are in and Andreas Tille has been elected. In a fairly competitive vote, Tille beat Sruthi Chandran to fill the position for the coming year. We looked at the election and the candidates a few weeks back.