Release of LibreELEC 11.0.4: 26/12/2023 A new release of the LibreELEC 11.0.4 project has been published, a fork of OpenELEC for home theaters. The user interface is based on the Kodi media center. Images have been prepared for loading from a USB drive or SD card (32- and 64-bit x86, Raspberry Pi 2/3/4/5, various devices on Rockchip, Allwinner, NXP and Amlogic chips). Build size for x86_64 architecture is 227 MB. With LibreELEC, you can turn any computer into a media center, which is no more difficult to operate than a DVD player or set-top box. The basic principle of the distribution is “everything just works”; to get a completely ready-to-use environment, you just need to load LibreELEC from a Flash drive. The user does not need to worry about keeping the system up to date - the distribution uses a system for automatically downloading and installing updates, activated when connected to the internet. You can expand the functionality of the distribution through a system of add-ons that are installed from a separate repository from the project developers. The distributionis not based off other distributions. In addition to the standard Kodi capabilities, the distribution provides a number of additional functions aimed at easy operation. For example, a special configuration add-on is being developed that allows you to configure network connection parameters, manage LCD screen settings, and allow or disable automatic installation of updates. Built-in features,include using a remote control (control is possible both via infrared and via Bluetooth), file sharing (Samba server is built-in), built-in BitTorrent client, automatic search and connection of local and external drives. https://libreelec.tv/2023/12/23/libreelec-nexus-11-0-4/

Release of Nobara 39: 27/12/2023 Nobara 39 has been released, building on Fedora Linux 39 and including additional fixes to address known issues with gaming, streaming, and content creation tasks. Six installation images are prepared for download: the official one with KDE ( 3.6 GB ), additional ones with GNOME ( 3.5 GB ), as well as variants of these images with proprietary NVIDIA drivers. The official image includes its own theme, while additional images offer the original GNOME and KDE skins. The distribution comes with proprietary components commonly used on workstations, such as multimedia codecs and drivers, as well as packages not included in the stock Fedora repository, such as OBS Studio, Steam, Lutris, and additional Wine dependencies. The goal of the project is to provide an out-of-the-box user experience that requires no post-installation steps and solves the main problems faced by Fedora users. Among the extended fixes offered by the distribution are the delivery of patches to the Linux kernel to reduce latency in games ( Zenify ), solving problems with OpenRGB, use the amdgpu driver for older GPUs, support for steam deck and Microsoft surface devices, improve compatibility with ASUS laptops, and eliminate simpledrm incompatibility with NVIDIA drivers, support for Lenovo Legion laptops, enabling ashmem and binder for Waydroid, troubleshooting problems when using Wayland with the nouveau driver. SELinux has been replaced by AppArmor. The new version includes the most recent releases of Mesa and Wine, straight from project repositories. They added patches to Glibc, Flatpak, SDL2, Mutter and xwayland. The Blender package includes support for FFmpeg and the HIP ray tracing library . There are additional dependencies for Davinci Resolve. A large selection of patches for OBS Studio is included, including patches for solving screen capture breakdowns in games using OpenGL and Vulkan, as well as patches for H.264 and H.265/HEVC hardware encoding on AMD, NVIDIA and Intel systems. By default, the RPMFusion repository is enabled. OnlyOffice is supplied as an office suite. https://nobaraproject.org/2023/12/26/december-26-2023

Exim 4.97.1 update: 29/12/2023 A maintenance release of the Exim mail server 4.97.1 is available, which includes changes to protect against the SMTP Smuggling attack. The attack allows one message to be split into several different messages through the use of a non-standard sequence for separating letters. The problem was initially thought to only affect postfix and sendmail, but was later discovered to also affect Exim ( CVE-2023-51766 ). Exim can process the sequences “\n.\n”, “\r\n.\n” and “\n.\r\n” as message separators if the server has the “PIPELINING” and “extensions enabled for incoming connections.” and CHUNKING“. The fix adds the strict_crlf setting, which allows you to return the ability to process non-standard sequences. As a security workaround, you can disable the “PIPELINING” or “CHUNKING” extension using the pipelining_advertise_hosts, pipelining_connect_advertise_hosts, and chunking_advertise_hosts settings. https://github.com/Exim/exim/releases/tag/exim-4.97.1

Gentoo has announced the availability of binary packages: 29/12/2023 The developers of the Gentoo Linux distribution, which was initially focused on creating an environment using the building of programs from source code, announced the introduction of a repository of ready-made binary packages. The Portage package manager has supported the installation of binary packages for many years, but until now binary packages have only been provided selectively - the distribution is supposed to primarily distribute build metadata, but the user can build binary packages on one of their systems and use them on other computers. From now forward, the project begins to provide binary builds, officially for downloading from its servers. At the user's discretion, binary builds can be used in combination with packages built from source code, combining different types of packages on your system. Direct downloading of binary packages will speed up the deployment of the distribution on low-power computers and optimize the installation process, allowing you to focus on building from source code only the most important components for customization. https://www.gentoo.org/news/2023/12/29/Gentoo-binary.html

Release of GNU inetutils 2.5: 30/12/2023 After 14 months of development, the GNU inetutils 2.5 suite was released with a collection of networking programs, most of which were transferred from BSD systems. In particular, it includes inetd and syslogd, servers and clients for ftp, telnet, rsh, rlogin, tftp and talk, as well as typical utilities such as ping, ping6, traceroute, whois, hostname, dnsdomainname, ifconfig, logger, etc. The new version eliminates a vulnerability ( CVE-2023-40303 ) in the suid programs ftpd, rcp, rlogin, rsh, rshd and uucpd, caused by a lack of verification of values ​​returned by the setuid(), setgid(), seteuid() and setguid() functions . The vulnerability can be used to create conditions where calling set*id() will not reset privileges and the application will continue to work with elevated privileges and perform operations under them that were originally designed to work with the rights of an unprivileged user. For example, ftpd, uucpd, and rshd processes running as root will continue to run as root after the user sessions start if set*id() fails https://www.mail-archive.com/info-gnu@gnu.org/msg03239.html

NetSurf browser 3.11: 30/12/2023 After three and a half years of development, the minimalistic multi-platform web browser NetSurf 3.11 was released, capable of running on systems with several tens of megabytes of RAM. The release is prepared for Linux, Windows, Haiku, AmigaOS, RISC OS and various Unix-like systems. The browser code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv2 license. The browser supports tabs, bookmarks, displaying page thumbnails, URL autocompletion in the address bar, page scaling, HTTPS, SVG, an interface for managing Cookies, a mode for saving pages with images, HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1 and partially HTML5 standards. Limited support for JavaScript is provided and is disabled by default. Pages are displayed using the browser's own engine, which is based on Hubbub, LibCSS and LibDOM libraries. The Duktape engine is used to process JavaScript . The new version has improved CSS support and ensures correct rendering of pages that use the flex CSS property.There is improved table layout, list processing and support for dark themes. Performance optimization has been carried out. Improved support for the RISC OS platform. Added support for JpegXL image format. They added a rsvg image decoder. By default, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are disabled and configured to use TLS 1.3. There is als0 added support for OpenSSL 3, with support for automatic replacement of http to https and an improved interface based on the GTK library. https://www.netsurf-browser.org/

MX Linux for Raspberry Pi: 30/12/2023 A new version of the lightweight MX Linux distribution has been introduced, designed for Raspberry Pi boards. The build has been tested on Raspberry Pi 4, 400 and 5 boards. Installation requires 16 GB of free space on a memory card or boot from a USB drive. The size of the compressed system image is 2.2 GB. The distribution combines components of the Raspberry PI OS and MX Linux distributions, includes the MX Tools and provides access to the MX Linux repositories. The user environment is based on Xfce. The MX Linux distribution uses the sysVinit initialization system and its own tools for configuring and deploying the system. Unlike the MX Linux build for x86 systems, the Raspberry Pi edition offers the Chromium browser by default instead of Firefox, there is no live mode, and after the first boot an interface for setting up the system is launched. https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-23-1-raspberry-pi-os-respin/

Release of wattOS 13: 30/12/2023 After a year of development, wattOS 13 was published, built on Debian and supplied with the LXDE graphical environment, the Openbox window manager and the PCManFM file manager. The distribution tries to be simple, fast, minimalistic and suitable for running on outdated hardware. The project was founded in 2008 and initially developed as a minimalist edition of Ubuntu. The size of the installation iso image is 1.4 GB; it supports both Live mode and installation on a hard drive. The new version switches to Debian 12 (the previous release was based on Debian 11, and the year before on Ubuntu 16.04) and the Linux 6.1 kernel. Calamares is used as the installer. There is support for packages in Flatpak format and the ability to install deb packages using the gdebi utility. https://www.planetwatt.com/R13-details/

Release of ScummVM 2.8.0: 31/12/2023 The free cross-platform interpreter of classic quest games, ScummVM 2.8.0, that replaces executable files for games and allows you to run many classic games on platforms for which they were not originally intended, has a new release. The project code is distributed under the GPLv3+ license. In total, you can launch more than 320 quest games, including games from LucasArts, Humongous Entertainment, Revolution Software, Cyan and Sierra, such as Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Broken Sword, Myst, Blade Runner, King's Quest 1-7, Space Quest 1-6 , Discworld, Simon the Sorcerer, Beneath A Steel Sky, Lure of the Temptress and The Legend of Kyrandia. It supports running games on Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, PS Vita, Switch, Dreamcast, AmigaOS, Atari/FreeMiNT, RISC OS, Haiku, PSP, PS3, Maemo, GCW Zero, etc. platforms. https://www.scummvm.org/news/20231230/

Update to Nodeverse: 01/01/2024 Version 0.4.0 of Nodeverse, a space exploration game built on the Minetest engine, has been released. The main functions of the game boil down to exploring planets, building and flying spaceships. The Nodeverse project was inspired by the game No Man's Sky , but uses voxel graphics. The game code is written in Lua and distributed under the GPLv3 license. This release breaks compatibility with previous versions. Changes include the addition of cacti, vines, water lilies, trees, mushrooms and underground lakes. New mods 'nv_flora', 'nv_gui', 'nv_encyclepedia' have been introduced. Improved performance and fixed various bugs. https://content.minetest.net/packages/aerkiaga/nodeverse/

Release of Gnuplot 6.0: 01/01/2024 Gnuplot 6.0, a free tool for creating two-dimensional and three-dimensional scientific plots, supporting a wide range of output formats and the ability to use scripts to generate input data, is out. This is the first major release since the 5.0 branch was published in 2015. https://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/ReleaseNotes_6_0_0.html

Release of Scribus 1.6.0: 01/01/2024 After 12 years of development, a new stable branch of the free document layout package Scribus 1.6.0 was announced, which incorporates the changes developed within the experimental 1.5.x branch. The package provides tools for professional layout of printed materials, includes flexible tools for generating PDFs and supports working with separate color profiles, CMYK, spot colors and ICC. The system is written using the Qt toolkit and is licensed under the GPLv2+ license. Ready-made binary assemblies are prepared for Linux (AppImage), macOS and Windows. Key improvements in the new branch include a new user interface based on Qt5, a changed file format, full support for tables, advanced text processing tools and an expansion of supported import and export formats. After the release of Scribus 1.6.0, the developers began developing the experimental branch 1.7, which will include a transition to Qt 6, a transition to the SVG format for icons, a new palette implementation and a new system of dockable panels. https://www.scribus.net/scribus-1-6-0-released/

Release of Snoop 1.4.0: 01/02/2024 The Snoop 1.4.0 project has been published, developing a forensic OSINT tool that searches for user accounts in public data (open source intelligence). The program analyzes various sites, forums and social networks for the presence of the required username, i.e. allows you to determine on which sites there is a user with the specified nickname. The project was developed based on research materials in the field of scraping public data. Builds are prepared for Linux and Windows. The code is written in Python and is distributed under a license restricting its use to personal use only. Moreover, the project is a fork from the code base of the Sherlock project , supplied under the MIT license (the fork was created due to the inability to expand the base of sites). https://github.com/snooppr/snoop

Release of Vim 9.1: 03/01/2024 After a year and a half of development, the text editor Vim 9.1 was released . The Vim code is distributed under its own copyleft license , compatible with the GPL and allowing unlimited use, distribution and reworking of the code. The main feature of the Vim license is related to the reversion of changes - improvements implemented in third-party products must be transferred to the original project if the Vim maintainer considers these improvements worthy of attention and submits a corresponding request. By distribution type, Vim is classified as Charityware, i.e. Instead of selling the program or collecting donations for the needs of the project, the authors of Vim ask to donate any amount to charity if the user likes the program. Vim 9.1 was the first release to be produced under the direction of a collective council, created after the death of the project's author, who took over the decision-making work. This issue is dedicated to the memory of Bram Moolenaar, the author and key developer of Vim, who has been maintaining the project for more than 30 years. Brahm developed the vast majority of changes to Vim - he made 16.5 thousand commits and added 3.5 million lines of code, which is 50 times more than the contribution of all other developers combined. https://www.vim.org/news/news.php

Release of IPFire 2.27 Core 182: 04/01/2024 IPFire 2.27 Core 182 has been published . IPFire is distinguished by a simple installation process and configuration through an intuitive web interface, replete with visual graphics. The size of the installation iso image is 423 MB (x86_64, AArch64). The system is modular, in addition to the basic functions of packet filtering and traffic management for IPFire, modules are available with the implementation of a system for preventing attacks based on Suricata, for creating a file server (Samba, FTP, NFS), a mail server (Cyrus-IMAPd, Postfix, Spamassassin, ClamAV and Openmailadmin) and a print server (CUPS), organizing a VoIP gateway based on Asterisk and Teamspeak, creating a wireless access point, organizing a streaming audio and video server (MPFire, Videolan, Icecast, Gnump3d, VDR). To install add-ons in IPFire, a special package manager, Pakfire, is used. https://blog.ipfire.org/post/ipfire-2-27-core-update-182-released

Maestro core, written in Rust and partially compatible with Linux: 04/01/2024 A project with a lightweight Unix-like kernel in the Rust language, implementing a subset of system calls of the Linux kernel sufficient to create standard working environments, was spotted in the wild. The project was created in 2018 and initially used the C language, but in 2020 it was completely restarted from scratch, taking into account the accumulated experience and switched to Rust to reduce the likelihood of errors arising when working with memory. The kernel code is distributed under the MIT license. In addition to the kernel, this Rust project is also developing an X11 server, a package manager, a loader, an installer, sets of utilities and other components necessary for building an operating system. The kernel has a monolithic architecture and currently only supports x86 systems in 32-bit mode. The kernel code base has 48.8 thousand lines of code (for comparison, the Linux kernel has 33 million lines of code). Can be run in QEMU, VirtualBox or on top of hardware. At the current stage of development, Maestro implements 31% (135 out of 437) of Linux system calls, which is enough to load a console environment based on bash and the standard C library Musl. The Maestro-based environment can also run some of the utilities from the GNU coreutils suite, such as ls, cat, mkdir, rm, rmdir, uname and whoami. https://blog.lenot.re/a/introduction

Linux kernel 6.7 release: 08/01/2024 After two months of development, Linus Torvalds presented the latest release of the Linux 6.7 kernel . Among the most notable changes were: integration of the Bcachefs file system, discontinuation of support for the Itanium architecture, the ability of Nouveau to work with GSP-R firmware, support for TLS encryption in NVMe-TCP, the ability to use exceptions in BPF, support for futex in io_uring, optimization of fq (Fair Queuing) scheduler performance ), support for the TCP-AO extension (TCP Authentication Option) and the ability to restrict network connections in the Landlock security mechanism, added access control to user namespace and io_uring via AppArmor. The new version includes 18,405 fixes from 2,066 developers, the patch size is 72 MB (the changes affected 13,467 files, 906,147 lines of code were added, 341,048 lines were deleted). The last release had 15291 fixes from 2058 developers, the patch size was 39 MB. About 45% of all changes introduced in 6.7 are related to device drivers, approximately 14% of changes are related to updating code specific to hardware architectures, 13% are related to the network stack, 5% are related to file systems, and 3% are related to internal kernel subsystems. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=widprp4XoHUcsDe7e16YZjLYJWra-dK0hE1MnfPMf6C3Q@mail.gmail.com/

KDE Plasma desktop in OpenBSD: 09/01/2024 Rafael Sadowski announced the availability of the KDE Plasma 5.27 user environment for installation on OpenBSD-current, ready-to-install packages, kde-plasma and kde-plasma-extra, and the intention to provide support for KDE Plasma in the spring release of OpenBSD 7.5. After the end of support for KDE4, OpenBSD never ported the KDE Plasma 5 desktop. Packages with KDE Gears 5 applications and KDE Frameworks 5 libraries have been available in OpenBSD ports for quite some time, but the shell itself has remained inoperable until now. https://rsadowski.de/posts/2024-01-09-openbsd-kde/

Release of Solus 4.5: 09/01/2024 A new release of Solus 4.5 has been published, which is not based on packages of other distributions and develops its own installer, package manager and configurator. Previously, the Budgie desktop was developed as part of the distribution , but now it is separated into an independent project. The dev's decided to develop the next branch of Solus 5 using the technologies of the SerpentOS distribution. The project's development code is distributed under the GPLv2 license; C and Vala languages ​​are used for development. Builds with Budgie, GNOME, KDE Plasma and Xfce desktops are provided. The size of iso images is 2.7 GB (x86_64). The distribution follows a hybrid development model in which it periodically releases major releases that offer new technologies and significant improvements, and in between major releases the distribution develops using a rolling model of package updates. https://getsol.us/2024/01/08/solus-4-5-released/

Chrome OS 120 released: 09/01/2024 A new release of Chrome OS 120 is available, based on the Linux kernel, the upstart system manager, the ebuild/portage assembly tools, open components and the Chrome 120 web browser. The user environment of Chrome OS is limited to a web browser, and instead of standard programs, web applications are used, however, Chrome OS includes a full multi-window interface, desktop and taskbar. The source code is distributed under the free Apache 2.0 license. Chrome OS 120 build is available for most current Chromebook models. Chrome OS Flex edition is offered for use on regular computers. https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2024/01/stable-channel-update-for-chromeos.html

Arch Linux switched to using dbus-broker: 09/01/2024 Arch Linux developers have announced the use of the dbus-broker project as the default implementation of the D-Bus bus. (say that 3 x fast!) It is claimed that using dbus-broker instead of the classic dbus-daemon background process will improve reliability, increase performance and improve integration with systemd. The ability to use the old dbus-daemon background process as an option is retained - the Pacman package manager will provide a choice in installing dbus-broker-units or dbus-daemon-units, offering the first option by default. By comparison, the Fedora project switched to dbus-broker by default in 2019. D-Bus Broker is implemented in user space, but actively uses Linux kernel subsystems for acceleration, remains compatible with the D-Bus reference implementation, and can be used to transparently replace dbus-daemon. At the same time, dbus-broker was initially designed to support functionality that is in demand in practice, takes into account resources associated with users and pays special attention to optimizing performance and increasing reliability (for example, a message cannot be lost without error handling). https://archlinux.org/news/making-dbus-broker-our-default-d-bus-daemon/

Arti 1.1.12, an implementation of Tor in Rust: 10/01/2024 The Arti 1.1.12 project, which develops a Tor client written in the Rust language, has a new release. The 1.x branch is marked as suitable for use by general users and provides the same level of privacy, usability, and stability as the main C implementation. The code is distributed under the Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses. Version Arti 1.1.12 is notable for bringing the implementation of onion services to the point of being ready for testing and experimentation. Using Arti, you can now not only connect to existing onion services, but also create your own onion services. At the same time, some features for ensuring privacy and protection of onion services are not yet ready, such as client authorization, protection against DoS attacks and the mechanism for preventing the detection of Vanguard Guard nodes, so the implementation is not yet recommended for production implementations. https://blog.torproject.org/arti_1_1_12_released/

The GodotOS project toy: 11/01/2024 The first release of the GodotOS project has been published. It is a prototype graphical interface created using the Godot game engine. GodotOS is being touted as an experiment in using a game engine to design a minimalistic, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing desktop interface. The project code is written in GDScript and is distributed under the AGPLv3 license. Builds are available for Linux and Windows. A demo has also been prepared, downloadable via the Web and running in a browser. GodotOS supports working with files, editing text documents, viewing images, and even running simple games. Creating an interface for launching games and built-in applications is mentioned as one of the possible future applications. https://github.com/popcar2/GodotOS/releases/tag/1.0.0

End of support for LTS Linux kernel 4.14: 11/01/2024 Greg Kroah-Hartman, responsible for maintaining the stable branch of the Linux kernel, announced the publication of the final release of the Linux kernel 4.14.336, which will be the last in this series. Branch 4.14 was published in November 2017 and has been maintained for 6 years. It is recommended that products shipped with the 4.14 kernel be upgraded to more current LTS releases. https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/1/10/201

First release candidate for KDE 6: 11/01/2024 Testing has begun on release candidates for the KDE Plasma 6 user environment, the KDE Frameworks 6 libraries and the KDE Gear 6 collection of applications. The release candidate marks the transition to the final testing stage ahead of release scheduled for February 28th. To evaluate KDE 6, you can use builds from the KDE Neon project. The key change in the KDE 6 branch is the transition to Qt 6, changing some basic settings, cleaning up obsolete features and delivering an updated base set of libraries and runtime components of KDE Frameworks 6, which forms the KDE software stack. By default, KDE Plasma 6 offers a session that uses the Wayland protocol, a new task switching interface, and a floating panel display mode, which has visible padding between the panel and the screen borders. Behavioral changes include switching to double-clicking to open files and directories and disabling the ability to switch virtual desktops by scrolling on the desktop. Among the functional changes, we can note the transfer of the shell, libraries and applications from Kirigami.AbstractListItem widgets to Kirigami.BasicListItem, the implementation of separate colour management for each screen, the return of the effect for navigating across desktops in the form of a rotating cube, a change in the design of the Discover application manager, modernization of the configurator and panel configuration interface, the ability to unlock the screen using a smart card or fingerprint, HDR support in games. https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/rc1/

The OpenSSH Project plan to deprecate DSA support: 12/01/2024 The developers of the OpenSSH project have presented a plan to end support for keys based on the DSA algorithm. By modern standards, DSA keys do not provide the proper level of protection, since they are limited by the size of the private key of only 160 bits and the SHA1 hash, which, according to the estimated security level, corresponds to approximately an 80-bit symmetric key. By default, the use of DSA keys was discontinued in 2015, but DSA support is left as an option, since this algorithm is the only one required for implementation in the SSHv2 protocol. This requirement was added because at the time of the creation and approval of the SSHv2 protocol, all alternative algorithms were subject to patents. Since then, the situation has changed, the patents associated with RSA have expired, the ECDSA algorithm has been added, which is significantly superior to DSA in performance and security, as well as EdDSA, which is safer and faster than ECDSA. The only factor in continuing DSA support was maintaining compatibility with legacy devices. https://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/openssh-unix-announce/2024-January/000156.html

Release of Linux Mint 21.3: 12/01/2024 The release of the Linux Mint 21.3 distribution has been announced, continuing the development of a branch based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The distribution is fully compatible with Ubuntu, but differs significantly in the approach to organizing the user interface and the selection of default applications. Linux Mint developers provide a desktop environment that follows the classic canons of desktop layout, which is more familiar to users who do not accept the new methods of building the GNOME 3 interface. Builds based on the MATE 1.26 ( 2.9 GB ) and Cinnamon 6.0 ( 2.9 GB ) are available for download as well as Xfce 4.18 ( 2.8 GB ). Linux Mint 21 is classified as a long-term support (LTS) release, for which updates will be generated until 2027. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4624

Release of Firebird 5.0 DBMS: 13/01/2024 After two and a half years of development, the release of the relational DBMS Firebird 5.0 was presented . Firebird continues the development of the InterBase 6.0 DBMS code, opened in 2000 by Borland. Firebird is licensed under the free MPL and supports ANSI SQL standards, including features such as triggers, stored procedures, and replication. Binary builds are prepared for Linux, Windows, macOS and Android. https://firebirdsql.org/en/news/firebird-5-0-0-is-released/

PulseAudio 17.0 sound server available: 13/01/2024 PulseAudio 17.0 , which acts as an intermediary between applications and various low-level audio subsystems, abstracting work with harrdware, is out. PulseAudio allows you to control the volume and mixing of sound at the level of individual applications, organize the input, mixing and output of sound in the presence of several input and output channels or sound cards, allows you to change the format of the audio stream on the fly and use plug-ins and makes it possible to transparently redirect the audio stream to another machine . PulseAudio code is licensed under LGPL 2.1+. Supports Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, NetBSD, macOS and Windows. It is noted that there are relatively few improvements in the new PulseAudio 17.0 branch and the development of the project has recently slowed down, as the community's main attention is now focused on the development of the Pipewire multimedia server, the WirePlumber audio session manager and related projects. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2024-January/032426.html

The Linux 6.8 kernel to speed up TCP: 14/01/2024 The code on which the Linux 6.8 kernel is based has been updated with a set of changes that significantly improve the performance of the TCP stack. In cases where multiple parallel TCP connections are processed, the speedup can reach 40%. The improvement was possible because variables in the network stack structures (socks, netdev, netns, mibs) were positioned as they were added, which was determined by historical reasons. Revision of the placement of variables in structures in order to improve the efficiency of working with the processor cache (minimizing the use of cache lines at the data transfer stage) and optimizing access to variables led to a noticeable increase in TCP speed, especially in the case of a large number of simultaneous TCP connections. https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/3e7aeb78ab01c2c2f0e1f784e5ddec88fcd3d106

Release of Lutris 0.5.15: 15/01/2024 The Lutris gaming platform, version 0.5.15 has been released, providing tools to make it easier to install, configure, and manage games on Linux. The project code is written in Python and is distributed under the GPLv3 license. The project maintains a database for quickly searching and installing games, allowing you to launch games on Linux through a single interface with one click, without worrying about installing dependencies and settings. Runtime components for running games are supplied by the project and are not tied to the distribution used. A runtime is a distribution-independent set of libraries that includes components from SteamOS and Ubuntu, as well as various additional libraries. You can install games distributed through GOG, Steam, Epic Games Store, Battle.net, Amazon Games, Origin and Uplay. At the same time, Lutris itself acts only as an intermediary and does not sell games, so for commercial games the user must independently purchase the game from the appropriate service (free games can be launched with one click from the Lutris graphical interface). https://github.com/lutris/lutris/releases/tag/v0.5.15

openSUSE Leap 16 will be built on the ALP platform using containers: 16/01/2024 The openSUSE project developers have announced their start of work on the next major release of the openSUSE Leap 16, which will be based on the new ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform) technology platform, which the commercial SUSE distribution is also moving to. openSUSE Leap 16.0 is planned for release in 2025. This year, on June 11, openSUSE Leap 15.6 will be released, which will most likely become the last classic release of the project. If for some reason the development of openSUSE Leap 16 is delayed, they will extend the life cycle of openSUSE Leap 15.6 or release an additional release of openSUSE Leap 15.7. The development of openSUSE Leap 16 plans to continue using the openSUSE Factory repository development model and achieve an optimal balance between new ALP technologies, the traditional Linux operating system and community package integration initiatives. The ALP platform is positioned as a continuation of the development of the SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution and is distinguished by dividing the basic distribution into parts. The main distribution will be a stripped-down “host OS” environment, which includes only the components minimally necessary to work on top of your equipment. All applications and user space components will not run in a mixed environment, but in separate containers or virtual machines running on top of the “host OS” and isolated from each other. https://news.opensuse.org/2024/01/15/clear-course-is-set-for-os-leap/

COSMIC Custom Shell: 16/01/2024 System76, the developer of the Linux distribution Pop!_OS , announced progress in developing their custom shell called COSMIC , rewritten in the Rust language (not to be confused with the old COSMIC, which was based on the GNOME Shell). The shell has been in development for over two years and is close to the first alpha release, which will mark the readiness of a basic set of features that allow the shell to be considered a working product. They expect that the alpha version will be published at the end of March and will help gather more feedback to finalize the functionality and improve the usability. Highlights include COSMIC Terminal emulator , written using the alacritty_terminal framework and supporting features such as GPU rendering, skins, and rich input methods. Among the tasks under development, the addition of support for mouse emulation and the ability to open hyperlinks in the terminal, are noted. https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-the-road-to-alpha

VirtualBox 7.0.14 released: 17/01/2024 Oracle has published a corrective release of the virtualization system VirtualBox 7.0.14 , which contains 14 fixes. At the same time, an update of the previous branch of VirtualBox 6.1.50 was created with 7 changes , including support for packages with the kernel from the RHEL 9.4 and 8.9 distributions, as well as the implementation of the ability to import and export images of virtual machines with NVMe drive controllers and media inserted into the virtual CD drive/ DVD. https://www.mail-archive.com/vbox-announce@virtualbox.org/msg00229.html

MySQL 8.3.0 DBMS: 17/01/2024 Oracle has formed a new branch of the MySQL 8.3 DBMS and published a corrective update for MySQL 8.0.36 . MySQL Community Server 8.3.0 builds are prepared for all major Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Windows distributions. MySQL 8.3.0 is the third release built under the new release model, which provides for the presence of two types of MySQL branches - “Innovation” and “LTS”. The Innovation branches, which include MySQL 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3, are recommended for those who want to get access to new functionality earlier. These branches are published every 3 months and are supported only until the next major release is published. LTS branches are recommended for implementations that require predictability and long-term unchanged behavior. LTS branches will be released every two years and will be supported normally for 5 years, in addition, you can get another 3 years of extended support. An LTS release of MySQL 8.4 is expected in the spring of 2024, after which a new Innovation branch, 9.0 will be formed. https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/

X.Org Server 21.1.11: 18/01/2024 Corrective releases of X.Org Server 21.1.11 and DDX component (Device-Dependent X) xwayland 23.2.4 have been published , which ensures the launch of X.Org Server for running/executing X11 applications in Wayland-based environments. The new versions fix 6 vulnerabilities, some of which can be exploited for privilege escalation on systems where the X server is running as root, as well as for remote code execution in configurations that use X11 session redirection via SSH for access. https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2024-January/061526.html

Release of Tesseract 5.3.4: 18/01/2024 The release of the optical text recognition system, Tesseract 5.3.4 was announced. It supports recognition of UTF-8 characters and texts in more than 100 languages. The result can be saved in plain text or in HTML (hOCR), ALTO (XML), PDF and TSV formats. The system was originally created between 1985-1995 in the Hewlett Packard laboratory; in 2005, the code was opened under the Apache license and was further developed with the participation of Google employees. The source code of the project is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. Tesseract includes a console utility and the libtesseract library for embedding OCR functionality into other applications. Third-party GUI interfaces that support Tesseract include gImageReader , VietOCR and YAGF. Two recognition engines are offered: a classic one that recognizes text at the level of individual character patterns, and a new one based on the use of a machine learning system based on an LSTM recurrent neural network, optimized for recognizing entire strings and allowing for a significant increase in accuracy. Ready-made trained models have been published for 123 languages . To optimize performance, modules using OpenMP and SIMD instructions AVX2, AVX, AVX512F, NEON or SSE4.1 are offered. https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/releases/tag/5.3.4

Release of GNU Emacs 29.2: 18/01/2024 The GNU Project has published a new release of the GNU Emacs 29.2 text editor. Until the release of GNU Emacs 24.5, the project developed under the personal leadership of Richard Stallman, who handed over the post of project leader to John Wiegley in the fall of 2015. The project code is written in C and Lisp and is distributed under the GPLv3 license. <nowiki>In the new release on the GNU/Linux platform, Emacs is set to handle the 'org-protocol' URI scheme by default. The “org” mode allows you to quickly save bookmarks, notes and links using the 'emacsclient' command, for example to save a URL link with a title you can run 'emacsclient “org-protocol:store-link?url=URL&title=TITLE”. In addition, the new version offers a new option 'tramp-show-ad-hoc-proxies', with which you can enable the display of external file names instead of shortcuts to them.<\nowiki> https://www.mail-archive.com/info-gnu@gnu.org/msg03249.html Foxconn joins initiative to protect Linux from patent claims: 18/01/2024 Foxconn has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), an organization dedicated to protecting the Linux ecosystem from patent claims. By joining OIN, Foxconn has demonstrated its commitment to co-innovation and non-aggressive patent management. Foxconn ranks 20th among the largest corporations by revenue (Fortune Global 500) and is the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer (about 40% of all consumer electronic devices are manufactured at Foxconn). OIN members agree not to assert patent claims and will freely permit the use of patented technologies in projects related to the Linux ecosystem. OIN members include more than 3,800 companies, communities, and organizations that have signed a patent-sharing license agreement. Among the main participants of OIN, ensuring the creation of a patent pool protecting Linux, are companies such as Google, Amazon, IBM, NEC, Toyota, Renault, SUSE, Philips, Red Hat, Alibaba, HP, AT&T, Juniper, Facebook, Cisco, Casio, Huawei, Fujitsu, Sony and Microsoft. Companies that sign the agreement gain access to patents held by OIN in exchange for an obligation not to pursue legal claims for the use of technologies used in the Linux ecosystem. Including as part of joining OIN, Microsoft transferred to OIN participants the right to use more than 60 thousand of its patents, pledging not to use them against Linux and open source software. https://openinventionnetwork.com/hon-hai-technology-group-foxconn-joins-open-invention-network-community/ ====== 14 ====== Release of Wayland-Protocols 1.33: 19/01/2024 After six months of development, a new release of the wayland-protocols 1.33 package has been published, containing a set of protocols and extensions that complement the capabilities of the base Wayland protocol and provide the capabilities necessary for building composite servers and user environments. In the new version, the ” linux-dmabuf “ protocol has been transferred to the stable category , which ensures the sharing of several video cards using DMA-BUF technology (allows you to create wl_buffer based on DMA-BUF). A new protocol ” ext-transient-seat “ has been added and placed in the “staging” category. The new protocol can be used to create temporary independent sessions (seats) designed for use with virtual input devices implemented using the “virtual_keyboard_unstable_v1” and “wlr_virtual_pointer_unstable_v1” protocols. For example, when implementing the ability to connect to a remote desktop, the protocol allows you to create a separate session for each user with a virtual keyboard and mouse. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2024-January/043400.html KDE has improved scaling support and added autosaving in Dolphin: 20/01/2024 Nate Graham, a QA developer on the KDE project, has published a report on preparations for the KDE 6 release scheduled for February 28th. The KDE Plasma 6.0 and KDE Gears 6.0 codebase has been forked into a separate repository, and the master branch has begun accumulating changes for KDE Plasma 6.1 and KDE Gears 24.05. https://pointieststick.com/2024/01/19/this-week-in-kde-auto-save-in-dolphin-and-better-fractional-scaling/ Release of GNU Ocrad OCR 0.29: 21/01/2024 After two years of development, the Ocrad 0.29 (Optical Character Recognition) text recognition system, developed under the GNU project, has been released . Ocrad can be used both in the form of a library for integrating OCR functions into other applications, and in the form of a separate utility that, based on the image passed to the input, produces text in UTF-8 or 8-bit encodings. For optical recognition, Ocrad uses a feature extraction method. It includes a page layout analyzer that allows you to correctly separate columns and blocks of text in printed documents. Recognition is supported only for characters from the “ascii”, ” iso-8859-9 “ and ” iso-8859-15 “ encodings (there is no support for the Cyrillic alphabet). https://www.mail-archive.com/info-gnu@gnu.org/msg03251.html ====== 15 ====== Hans Reiser commented on deprecating ReiserFS: 19/01/2024 The mailing list of Linux kernel developers has published letters received by one of the developers during correspondence with Hans Reiser. In 2008 Reiser was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his wife as a result of a quarrel with a subsequent attempt to cover up the crime (in 2027 Hans will be able to file application for parole). In the published letters, Hans regrets his mistakes in interacting with the developer community, discusses the deprecation of ReiserFS v3 in the Linux kernel 6.6 , analyzes the history of the development of ReiserFS, mentions hopes associated with the promotion of ReiserFS v4, and explains the technical solutions implemented in ReiserFS v4. Commenting on the decision to remove ReiserFS from the kernel, Hans mentioned that the question of whether this FS remains useful and whether it should continue to be supplied in the kernel should be decided by users and maintainers, taking into account current realities. He understands that having ReiserFS code in the kernel creates additional burden on maintainers due to the need to test and ensure compatibility with new features emerging in the kernel, and if the FS is no longer relevant, there is no point in continuing to ship it as part of the kernel. During the development of ReiserFS 4, many of the shortcomings of ReiserFS 3 were addressed and maintenance was simplified, but this version was never accepted into the kernel. According to Hans, his only request is to add a README file accompanying the ReiserFS code , before the ReiserFS code is removed from the kernel, mentioning Mikhail Gilulu, Konstantin Shvachko and Anatoly Pinchuk, whose contributions to the development remained undeservedly missed. They were hired by Hans and developed ReiserFS, but due to Hans’ unrestrained character and excessive demands (Hans could work around the clock and expected similar enthusiasm from others) they left the project, which at that time was perceived by Hans as a betrayal, but over time he realized that their decision was justified under the circumstances. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/b98b29cf-27d9-49e0-b10b-1848399badfd@kittens.ph/T/ Fuchsia Workstation OS Development Program Canceled: 16/01/2024 The components required to build the Chrome browser for the Fuchsia operating system have been removed from the Chromium project repository . It is noted that support for Fuchsia in Chrome was an experiment that has now been discontinued. They separately stated that the reason for the termination of support is the winding down of the Fuchsia development program for workstations. Support for the WebEngine and WebRunner browser components for Fuchsia will continue, but a separate full-fledged Chrome browser will not be provided. Fuchsia's future development will likely focus only on consumer devices, such as home automation systems, smart photo frames and speakers. Fuchsia is based on the Zircon microkernel, which is based on the LK project, extended for use on various classes of devices, including smartphones and personal computers. Zircon extends LK with support for processes and shared libraries, a user level, an object handling system and a capability-based security model. Drivers are implemented as dynamic libraries running in user space, loaded by the devhost process and managed by the device manager (devmg, Device Manager). Fuchsia has its own graphical interface written in Dart using the Flutter framework. The project also develops the Peridot user interface framework, the Fargo package manager, the libc standard library, the Escher rendering system, the Magma Vulkan driver, the Scenic composite manager, the MinFS, MemFS, ThinFS (FAT in Go language) and Blobfs file systems, as well as FVM partitions. For application development, support for C/C++ and Dart languages ​​are provided, Rust is allowed in system components, Go is used in the network stack, and Python is used in the build system. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id%3D1509109**