Lutris 0.5.19 Released: 24/02/2025 The Lutris 0.5.19 release of the gaming platform has been published. It provides tools to simplify the installation, configuration and management of games on Linux. The project code is written in Python and is distributed under the GPLv3 license. Ready-made builds are available only in the flatpak format :( and Ubuntu is five (5) versions behind as usual! (just checked Synaptic, yep, 5.14) The project maintains a catalog for quick search and installation of gaming applications, allowing one click to launching games in Linux, through a single interface, without worrying about installing dependencies and settings. Runtime components for launching games are supplied by the project and are not tied to the distribution used. Runtime is a distribution-independent set of libraries, including 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. However, Lutris itself only acts as an intermediary and does not sell games, so for commercial games the user must independently purchase the game from the corresponding service (free games can be launched with one click from the Lutris graphical interface). Each game in Lutris is tied to a boot script and a handler that describes the environment for launching the game. This includes ready-made profiles with optimal settings for launching games under Wine. In addition to Wine, games can be launched using game console emulators such as RetroArch, Dosbox, FS-UAE, ScummVM, MESS/MAME and Dolphin . https://github.com/lutris/lutris/releases/tag/v0.5.19

Apache NetBeans 25 IDE: 24/02/2025 The release of Apache NetBeans 25 integrated development environment is presented, which provides support for programming languages, like ​​Java SE, Java EE, PHP, C/C++, JavaScript, Rust and Groovy. Ready-made builds are generated for Linux ( snap , flatpak ), Windows and macOS. https://netbeans.apache.org/front/main/blogs/entry/announce-apache-netbeans-25-released/

Release of MythTV 35: 24/02/2025 After a year of development, the MythTV 35 home media center platform was released, allowing you to turn your desktop PC into a TV, video recording system, music center, photo album, DVD recording and viewing station. The project code is written in C++ and is distributed under the GPLv2 license. The MythTV architecture is based on the division of the backend for storing or capturing video (IPTV, DVB cards, etc.) and the frontend for generating the interface (web interface and Qt-based GUI). The frontend is capable of working simultaneously with several backends, which can be launched both on the local system and on external computers. Extended functionality is implemented through plugins. Currently, two sets of plugins are available - official and unofficial. The range of capabilities covered by the plugins ranges from integration with various online services to tools for working with a web camera and organizing video communication between PCs. https://www.mythtv.org/news/175/v35.0%2520Released

Aqualung 2.0 Music Player Ported to GTK3 Released: 25/02/2025 The release of the Aqualung 2.0 music player has been published. It provides an interface for playing audio CDs, local music collection files, online radio stations and podcasts. Aqualung's special feature is its gapless playback mode, which allows playing music files in a continuous stream, in which one composition replaces another without pausing. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv2 license. It supports Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows and macOS. Among the advanced features, the following was highlighted, the ability to increase or decrease the sampling frequency of the file being played before sending the audio stream to the audio output device. LADSPA plug-ins can be connected to apply effects, improve the quality and process the sound . For example, you can use plug-ins with different implementations of equalizers, spatial sound optimizers and tube preamplifier simulators. The key change in Aqualung 2.0 was the transition of the application from GTK2 to the GTK3 branch. CSS was used to design the interface. The ability to use previously prepared skins to change the interface was discontinued. An option to switch between light and dark themes was added to the settings. Support for new versions of the Monkey's Audio format for encoding sound without loss of quality was added. The number of supported formats in the FFmpeg-based decoder was expanded. https://github.com/jeremyevans/aqualung/releases/tag/2.0

X.Org Server 21.1.16 Update Fixes 8 Vulnerabilities: 26/02/2025 Corrective releases of X.Org Server 21.1.16 and the DDX (Device-Dependent X) component xwayland 24.1.6 have been published, ensuring the launch of X.Org Server for the execution of X11 applications in Wayland-based environments. The new version of X.Org Server fixes 8 vulnerabilities. The problems can potentially be exploited for privilege escalation on systems where the X server is executed with root rights, as well as for remote code execution in configurations where X11 session redirection using SSH is used for access. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/tags/

Nextcloud Hub 10 is released: 26/02/2025 The Nextcloud Hub 10 platform is released, providing a self-sufficient solution for organizing the collaboration of employees of enterprises and teams developing various projects. At the same time, the Nextcloud 31 cloud platform underlying Nextcloud Hub was published, allowing you to deploy cloud storage with support for synchronization and data exchange, providing the ability to view and edit data from any device at any point in the network (download a list of participants in CSV format, create, import and export surveys using a web interface or WebDAV). The Nextcloud server can be deployed on any hosting that supports the execution of PHP scripts and provides access to SQLite, MariaDB / MySQL or PostgreSQL. The Nextcloud source code is distributed under the AGPL license. In terms of the tasks it solves, Nextcloud Hub resembles Google Docs and Microsoft 365, but allows you to deploy a fully controlled collaborative infrastructure that operates on its own servers and is not tied to external cloud services. Nextcloud Hub combines several open -source add-on applications over the Nextcloud cloud platform into a single environment, allowing you to work together with office documents, files, and information for planning tasks and events. The platform also includes add-ons for accessing email, exchanging messages, organizing video conferences, and chats. User authentication can be performed either by a local database or through integration with LDAP/Active Directory, Kerberos, IMAP and Shibboleth/SAML 2.0, including the use of two-factor authentication, SSO (Single-sign-on) and linking new systems to an account using a QR code. Version control allows you to track changes in files, comments, sharing rules and tags. https://github.com/nextcloud/server/releases/tag/v31.0.0

A Project to Run FreeBSD Programs on Linux: 27/02/2025 FreeBSD developers have published a development report for the fourth quarter of 2024, which mentions the bsd-user-4-linux project, which is developing tools for running applications built for FreeBSD on Linux. The goal of the project is to achieve the ability to build natively using FreeBSD tools on Linux, as well as the ability to build packages for FreeBSD on Linux using the native FreeBSD build tools. To run FreeBSD executable files, a fork of the QEMU emulator is used, operating in 'User Mode' Emulation mode, designed to run processes compiled for other CPUs and operating systems. In this mode, QEMU translates system calls and processes signals. To run applications, you need to deploy libraries and settings from the FreeBSD base system to a local directory. The project can be considered as BSDlator - a reverse of Linuxulator. At the current stage of development, the launch of the main system utilities (sh, bash, find, grep, git, clang, etc.) works, dynamic linking and shared libraries are supported, network functions are available. For example, you can already rebuild FreeBSD with the command “make -j80 buildworld” while in Linux. The missing functionality includes the inability to launch the GDB debugger, the unavailability of IPC, kevent/kqueue functions, and some sysctl (for example, name2oid). Additionally, the project is preparing container images with the FreeBSD working environment for various architectures (linux/386, linux/amd64, linux/arm/v5 and linux/arm64/v8) and providing GitHub Actions for creating such images. https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2024-10-2024-12/

OpenCloud 1.0 Now Available: 27/02/2025 The first release of the OpenCloud platform has been presented, allowing you to deploy a system for file sharing and collaborative work on content on your server. The project is presented as an open alternative to proprietary systems Microsoft SharePoint, Google Drive and Dropbox, compliant with GDPR requirements. OpenCloud is a fork of the OCIS (ownCloud Infinite Scale) platform, rewritten from PHP to Go, unlike the original ownCloud codebase and the NextCloud project that branched off from it. The creators of OpenCloud tried to rid the codebase of unnecessary functionality and focus on the highest quality implementation of the main task - collaborative work with files. In addition to file storage and sharing features, as well as synchronized access to a file collection from different devices, OpenCloud includes capabilities for collaborative editing of documents in real time, integration with the Collabora Online office suite and Markdown Editor (ToastUI), text extraction from images and scanned documents using OCR, and the use of the ICAP protocol to check downloaded files in antivirus packages. You can limit the lifetime of published files, provide access via a link, and protect the content with a password. Tags, filters, and full-text search are supported to simplify file navigation. The system tracks the entire history of work with files and provides support for rolling back changes to a specific version in the past. You can organize teams by assigning subdirectories (“workspaces”) to individual teams. The administrator is provided with a detailed interface for managing access rights and users (for example, you can allow a user to only view or only upload to storage). Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is supported. The platform uses the Privacy-First architecture, which means that an OpenCloud user with administrator rights cannot access user content. The server part is written in Go, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and supports the WebDAV, gRPC, Microsofts RESTful Web API Graph, OCS, OCM 1.1 and OpenID Connect programming interfaces. It is noted that the server is implemented using the microservices concept and can be scaled from installation on Raspberry Pi boards to large multi-server implementations. The desktop client is written in C++ using Qt, published under the GPLv3 license, and supports building for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The client also has a built-in file synchronization feature and mounting of shared storage as a virtual file system. https://opencloud.eu/en/news/opencloud-now-available-new-open-source-alternative-microsoft-sharepoint

Linux kernel 6.15 to remove SystemV filesystem: 27/02/2025 SUSE developer Jan Kara has proposed a patch that removes code from the Linux kernel that supports Xenix, SystemV/386, and Coherent file systems. The code has been orphaned since 2023, and no one has been willing to maintain it since then. Kernel maintainer Christian Brauner, who is responsible for file systems, agreed with the proposal and accepted the patch into the vfs-6.15 branch. A few hours ago, the contents of vfs-6.15 were moved to the linux-next branch, which is preparing changes for the upcoming 6.15 kernel. The story begins in 2002, when the Linux kernel got rid of the global lock (BKL - Big Kernel Lock) in favor of more granular locks. At that time, the SystemV file system switched to rwlock, but this led to problems due to which the processor could not go to sleep during the call of the entire function that read the inode metadata. The problem was noticed only in 2023 as a result of stress testing with the SyzBot tool. Such an incident shows that no one uses the SystemV file system and it can be removed. https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250221-dienlich-metapher-c2755e73b3f7@brauner/T/%23mf04463bbb9bb2d9461ea135955cd33ac29ebc0cd

Electronic Arts Opens Command & Conquer Games Under GPL License: 28/02/2025 Electronic Arts has announced the full source code for the Command & Conquer series of games: Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, Renegade, Generals, and Generals Zero Hour. Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, and Generals are real-time strategy games that feature military confrontations in various alternate realities and require building up military power by extracting resources available on the map. Renegade is a 3D first-person shooter with strategy elements. The release of the code was made possible by the work of Luke Feenan, an administrator of the CnCNet community that preserves the legacy of the Command & Conquer games. Electronic Arts gave Luke access to their archives, and he did the work of restoring the state of the code from the Perforce repositories and getting it into a buildable state. The build is supported only for Windows (the DirectX graphics API is used). To build C&C Renegade and C&C Generals, the Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 6+ compiler is required. The C&C Tiberian Dawn and C&C Red Alert code is tied to the Watcom C/C++ compiler (v10.6) and requires additional work to recreate the working build environment. Game resources are not included in the kit, so to run games based on executable files built from the code, resources from the original games are required. The code is open sourced under the GPLv3 license with additional terms regarding Electronic Arts trademarks. Trademark rights are not transferred with the code, and the license does not grant rights to distribute modified versions of the programs using Electronic Arts trademarks, such as “Command & Conquer”. Products created based on the published code must not state affiliation with Electronic Arts or its employees, and must not misrepresent the history of their origin. When creating modifications, the name of the games must be changed, and a note must mention that the product is a modified version of Electronic Arts code. Opening up the game under the GPLv3 license allows using components from the original Command & Conquer games to extend the functionality of the existing open source projects CnCNet and Open RA , which develop an unofficial network stack and open source engine for C&C Tiberian Dawn, C&C Red Alert, and Dune 2000. The game requires the original game assets to run, and can be used in accordance with the mod developer agreement, which allows non-commercial use only. https://www.ea.com/games/command-and-conquer/command-and-conquer-remastered/news/steam-workshop-support

Fish 4.0 Shell Rewritten in Rust: 27/02/2025 The interactive command shell, fish 4.0.0 (friendly interactive shell) has been released. It is aimed at creating a more user-friendly alternative to bash and zsh. Fish supports features such as syntax highlighting with automatic detection of input errors, suggestion of possible input options based on the history of past operations, autocompletion of input options and commands using their description in man-guides, comfortable work out of the box without the need for additional configuration, a simplified scripting language, clipboard support, and search tools in the history of completed operations. The project code is distributed under the GPLv2 license. Ready-made packages are formed for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE. The new branch is notable for the complete translation of the code base from C++ to Rust. It is noted that the transition to Rust allowed solving problems with multithreading, increasing the safety of working with memory, making the project more attractive to new developers, and using modern tools that detect errors at the compilation stage. The work on rewriting fish in Rust took two years. More than 200 developers took part in the creation of the 4.0 release. https://fishshell.com/blog/new-in-40/

NetworkManager 1.52.0 Released: 01/03/2025 A stable release of the interface for simplifying network settings, has been published - NetworkManager 1.52.0. Plugins for VPN support (Libreswan, OpenConnect, Openswan, SSTP, etc.) are being developed within their own development cycles. (the post is basically just a list of stuff, like“ Added support for using FEC (Forward Error Correction) mode when calling the “ethtool” utility. Link included below.) https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/-/tags/1.52.0

Release of Brushshe 1.2.0: 02/03/2025 The release of the lightweight raster graphics editor, Brushshe 1.2.0, has been published Features include stickers, frames and effects. The program supports saving drawings in different formats and has its own gallery where you can view saved drawings. The project code is written in Python using the CustomTkinter graphical toolkit and is distributed under the GNU GPL v3 license. There is a build for Windows, tested in Windows 11, Windows 10 and Wine (Ubuntu users can run it via Python). https://github.com/limafresh/Brushshe/releases/tag/v1.2.0

GhostBSD Release 25.01: 28/02/2025 The release of the desktop-oriented GhostBSD 25.01 distribution is presented. It is based on FreeBSD 14 and offers builds with MATE and Xfce user environments. By default, GhostBSD uses the ZFS file system. Both Live mode and installation on a hard drive are supported (using the proprietary ginstall installer written in Python). Boot images are generated for the x86_64 architecture ( 2.8 GB with MATE and 2.6 GB with Xfce). https://ghostbsd.org/news/GhostBSD_25.01-R14.2p1_Now_Available

ROSA Fresh 13 distribution is available: 28/02/2025 Three years after the formation of the previous major branch, the company NTC IT ROSA published the ROSA Fresh 13 distribution, based on the new rosa 13 platform. ROSA Fresh 13 is positioned as the first release demonstrating the capabilities of the new platform and intended primarily for enthusiasts. Builds with KDE ( 3 GB ) and GNOME ( 3 GB ) desktops for the x86_64 architecture are available for download. The repository contains packages for the aarch64, e2kv4, i686, loongarch64, riscv64 and x86_64 architectures. The new release is notable for updating packages to fresh versions of programs. The most significant change was the transition of the desktop environment to KDE 6 components ( KDE Plasma 6.3.1 release is used ). At the same time, packages with KDE Plasma 5.27.12 were left in the distro as an option. GNOME 47, LXQt 2.1, Xfce 4.20, MATE 1.28 were updated. The distribution uses the releases of Mesa 24.3, Qt 6.8.2, GCC 14.2, LLVM 19, Glibc 2.40, systemd 256, Perl 5.38, Python 3.11, Rust 1.84, Ruby 3.2.2, Go 1.23.6, PHP 8.3.14, Libreoffice 24.8.5, gimp 3.0-rc2. Packages with Linux kernel 6.1, 6.6 and 6.12 are available for installation. https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://forum.rosa.ru/viewtopic.php?t%3D11359

Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Focal Released: 03/03/2025 The OTA-8 Focal (over-the-air) firmware has been released, developed by the UBports project, which took over the development of the Ubuntu Touch mobile platform after Canonical stepped away from it. This is the eighth release of Ubuntu Touch, based on the Ubuntu 20.04 package base. The project also develops an experimental port of the Unity 8 desktop, which has been renamed Lomiri. Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Focal update will be generated in the coming days for Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1, F(x)tec Pro1 X, Fairphone 3/3+/4, Google Pixel 3a/3a XL, JingPad A1, Oneplus 5/5T/6/6T, OnePlus Nord N10 5G/N100, Sony Xperia X, Vollaphone X/22/X23 and Xiaomi Poco X3 NFC / X3. Compared to the previous release, builds have been added for Xiaomi Poco M2 Pro, Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro/Pro Max/9S, Volla Phone Quintus and Volla Tablet. The development of the new release focused on preparing for the transition to the newer LTS branch of Ubuntu. One of the big changes in Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Focal: Support for VoLTE (Voice over LTE), a technology for transmitting voice over LTE networks, has been implemented. Using VoLTE is currently only possible on Volla Phone X23 and Volla Phone 22 smartphones, the firmware for which uses Halium 12 system components. https://ubports.com/en/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-ota-8-focal-release-3953

OpenBot 0.8 Creation Platform Released: 04/03/2025 After almost two years of development, the OpenBot 0.8 open platform has been released. It is designed to create moving wheeled robots based on a regular Android smartphone. The platform was created in the research division of Intel and develops the idea of ​​using the computing capabilities of a smartphone and the built-in GPS, gyroscope, compass and camera in the creation of robots. The code, written in Swift and Java, is distributed under the MIT license. The software for robot control, environment analysis and autonomous navigation is implemented as an application for the Android platform. It is assumed that the platform can be useful for teaching robotics, quickly creating your own prototypes of moving robots and conducting research related to autopilots and autonomous navigation. OpenBot allows you to start experimenting with moving robots at a minimum cost - to create a robot, you can get by with a mid-range smartphone and additional components totaling about USD50. The chassis for the robot, as well as related parts for attaching the smartphone, are printed on a 3D printer according to the proposed layouts. If you do not have a 3D printer, you can cut a frame out of cardboard or plywood. Movement is provided by four electric motors. To control the engines, attachments and additional sensors, as well as to monitor the battery charge, an Arduino Nano board, based on the ATmega328P microcontroller, is used, which is connected to the smartphone via a USB port. Additionally, connection of speed sensors and ultrasonic sonar is supported. Remote control of the robot can be carried out via a client application for Android, via a computer located on the same WiFi network, via a web browser or via a game controller with Bluetooth support (for example, PS4, XBox and X3). https://github.com/ob-f/OpenBot/releases/tag/v0.8.0

Release of Godot 4.4 game engine: 04/03/2025 After seven months of development, the free Godot 4.4 game engine, suitable for creating 2D and 3D games, has been released. The engine supports an easy-to-learn game logic language, a graphical environment for designing games, a one-click game deployment system, animation and physics simulation capabilities, a built-in debugger, and a performance bottleneck detection system. The code for the game engine, game design environment, and related development tools (physics engine, sound server, 2D/3D rendering backends, etc.) is distributed under the MIT license. As a result of a conflict in the community, where Godot had doubled down on retarded gender politics, a fork of the project was founded last year - Redot. The fork was a response to the strict moderation policy in official communication channels and the rejection by Godot developers of opinions that differ from their views. The reasons for creating the fork were the desire to solve problems with community management and return to work for the benefit of the community, and not for corporate interests. The Redot project is trying to build an inclusive community in which politicization of the development process is unacceptable, and the main focus is only on creating games. Currently, the fork's development activity lags slightly behind the Godot engine. https://godotengine.org/article/godot-4-4-a-unified-experience/

Thunderbird 136.0 Mail Client Released: 05/03/2025 Thunderbird 136.0, a community-developed email client based on Mozilla technologies, has been released. Thunderbird 136 is built on the Firefox 136 codebase and is categorized as an intermediate version, with updates released before the next release. Thunderbird 128.8.0 has been released in the ESR branch, which has a long-term support period and updates are released throughout the year. The publication of Thunderbird 136.0 marked a change in the approach to forming releases. In addition to the previous scheme, in which a major release was formed once a year and based on the ESR branches of Firefox, major releases will now also be published once a month and based on the Firefox releases with a regular maintenance period. Previously, builds based on regular Firefox releases were not reflected on the download page, positioned as testing, and provided with a special warning in the release notes. Thunderbird 136 is offered by default and without the label of being intended for testing only. The formation and maintenance of the Thunderbird ESR branches will continue without changes. It is expected that the transition to monthly major releases will speed up the delivery of new features to users, smooth the transition to new major releases (changes will be spread out over time), and expand the range of bugs fixed with each update (the ESR branch only fixed vulnerabilities and serious issues). https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/03/thunderbird-release-channel-update/

Intel Adds eUSB2V2 Support to Linux Kernel: 05/03/2025 An engineer from Intel has prepared a change to support the second version of the eUSB2 extension (eUSB2V2 - Embedded USB2 Version 2.0). The change has been transferred to the usb-next branch, which tests the Linux kernel functionality planned for release 6.15 related to USB. eUSB2V2 is an extension of the USB 2.0 standard that reduces the supply voltage (to 1.2 volts) and increases performance. The data transfer rate in eUSB2V2 can reach 4.8 Gbps, which is 10 times faster than the usual 480 Mbps typical for USB 2.0. The proposed technology allows laptop manufacturers to equip their devices with higher-resolution webcams, while continuing to use the Embedded USB2 bus for connecting them. https://web.git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/usb.git/commit/?h%3Dusb-next%26id%3Dc749f058b4371430a8338e1ca72b9ae38fef613b

FerretDB 2.0 Release: 05/03/2025 FerretDB 2.0 is now available, allowing you to replace the proprietary document-oriented MongoDB DBMS with a fully open source software stack based on PostgreSQL without changing your application code. The code is written in Go and is licensed under Apache 2.0. The release is marked as ready for production deployments. FerretDB's primary target audience is MongoDB users who want to use a fully open source software stack. FerretDB supports a subset of MongoDB features that are most commonly used in typical applications. The need to implement FerretDB may arise due to MongoDB's transition to the proprietary SSPL license, which is based on the AGPLv3 license but is not open source because it contains a discriminatory requirement to distribute under the SSPL license not only the application code itself, but also the source code of all components involved in providing the cloud service. The key change in FerretDB 2.0 is the transition to DocumentDB, a Microsoft-opened extension to PostgreSQL that implements the ability to store data in a JSON-like BSON (Binary JSON) format compatible with MongoDB. Initially, FerretDB's work was limited to translating MongoDB requests into SQL queries to PostgreSQL. The transition to DocumentDB has increased FerretDB's performance by more than 20 times for some types of workload. Other new features in FerretDB 2.0 include improved compatibility with MongoDB, replication , and support for vector search . https://blog.ferretdb.io/ferretdb-v2-ga-open-source-mongodb-alternative-ready-for-production/

Release of FEX 2503: 06/03/2025 The FEX 2503 project has been published. It develops an emulator for running games and applications built for x86 and x86-64 architectures in a Linux environment on systems with ARM64 (AArch64) processors. The FEX emulator is used by the Asahi project to run games from the Steam catalog built for the x86_64 architecture on systems with ARM chips. The project code is written in C++ with assembler inserts and is distributed under the MIT license. Libraries required to run x86 applications in the ARM64 environment are connected in the form of an overlay layer with the root file system image ( rootfs ), supplied in the SquashFS format. Such an overlay makes it possible to do without creating a separate chroot environment. Loading of rootfs images already generated by the project is performed by the FEXRootFSFetcher utility. To access host environment capabilities, such as audio and 3D graphics tools, thunk libraries are placed in the rootfs, which translate calls to libraries and code on the host system side (for example, calls to OpenGL and Vulkan can be redirected). Such libraries can also be used on the host side, to call code in the guest environment. Among the libraries available for forwarding are: libEGL, libGL, libSDL2, libX11, libVDSO, libasound, libdrm, libfex_malloc, libvulkan, libwayland-client and libxshmfence. https://fex-emu.com/FEX-2503/

Google Publishes Toolkit for Analyzing and Modifying AMD Microcode: 06/03/2025 Engineers from Google have disclosed details of a vulnerability (CVE-2024-56161) that allows bypassing the digital signature verification mechanism when updating microcode in AMD processors based on the 1st to 4th generations of the Zen microarchitecture. At the same time, the Zentool toolkit, developed during the study of methods for working with microcode in AMD processors, was published under the Apache 2.0 license. A guide to the RISC86 microarchitecture used in AMD microcode and a note on creating your own microcode were also prepared. It shows how you can create your own processor instructions implemented on RISC86 microcode, change the behavior of existing instructions, and load microcode changes into the processor. For simplification, the Zentool toolkit has been developed, which allows you to analyze microcode, manipulate microcode, and create patches that can be used to change the microcode in AMD Zen processors. In the future, the developers plan to continue expanding the capabilities of the toolkit and provide a kind of analogue of binutils, but not for traditional machine code, but for microcode. Loading custom patches for AMD Zen 1-4 processor microcode was made possible by a vulnerability caused by the use of the CMAC impersonation algorithm during verification instead of a strong hash function. AMD fixed the vulnerability in a December microcode update by replacing CMAC with a cryptographically strong hash function. To digitally sign the microcode loaded into the processor, AMD uses a private RSA key, and adds a public key as part of the microcode patch. To verify that the public key matches the original RSA key pair, the processor compares the hash of the AMD public key embedded in the CPU during manufacturing with the hash of the public key specified in the patch. AMD uses a single encryption key for AES-CMAC, which is shipped on all CPUs from Zen 1 to Zen 4. Thus, it is enough to extract this key from any AMD CPU and it will be applicable to all other CPUs. The researchers found that the Zen 1 through Zen 4 generations of processors use a known key for AES-CMAC encryption, taken from an example mentioned in the NIST SP 800-38B block cipher recommendation . https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5424842357473280/zen-and-the-art-of-microcode-hacking https://github.com/google/security-research/blob/master/pocs/cpus/entrysign/zentool/docs/reference.md

Blender-Made Cartoon 'Flow' Wins Oscar: 06/03/2025 The 2025 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film has been awarded to the animated film Flow, directed by Latvian Gints Zilbalodis. The film follows the adventures of a cat during a flood and is notable for being created by an independent team on a limited budget in the free 3D modeling system Blender. Work on the film lasted five and a half years. In his previous works, the director used the Maya 3D package, but in 2019 he switched to Blender, after the EEVEE rendering engine was released in Blender 2.80. EEVEE supported real-time rendering and allowed him to implement the desired workflow. One of the most important selection criteria was speed, not only of rendering, but also of working with files, setting up lighting, and creating a general style. Blender also had all the tools the director needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)

Samba 4.22.0 Released: 06/03/2025 After 6 months of development, Samba 4.22.0 was released, continuing the development of the Samba 4 branch with a full implementation of a domain controller and Active Directory service, compatible with the Windows 2008 implementation and capable of servicing all Microsoft-supported versions of Windows clients, including Windows 11. Samba 4 is a multifunctional server product, also providing the implementation of a file server, print service and identification server (winbind). http://www.samba.org/

PipeWire 1.4.0 Released: 07/03/2025 After eight months of development, a new stable branch of the PipeWire 1.4.0 multimedia server is out. It has replaced the PulseAudio sound server and differs from it by adding tools for working with video streams, the ability to process sound with minimal delays and a new security model for managing access at the level of individual devices and streams. The project is supported in GNOME and is used by default in Fedora Linux, RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE/openSUSE and many other Linux distributions. The project code is written in C and distributed under the MIT license. PipeWire is based on a multi-process architecture that enables content sharing between multiple applications. It provides capabilities for handling any media streams, mixing and redirecting video streams, and managing video sources such as video capture devices, webcams, or screen content output by applications. PipeWire enables multiple applications to work together with a webcam and solves the problems of secure screen capture and remote screen access in a Wayland environment. When used as an audio server, PipeWire can provide low latency and functionality that combines the capabilities of PulseAudio and JACK, including the needs of professional audio systems that PulseAudio could not claim. PipeWire offers an advanced security model that allows access control at the level of individual devices and specific streams. The implemented access model simplifies the routing of audio and video in and out of isolated containers. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/releases/1.4.0

Apertis 2025.0: 08/03/2025 Collabora has introduced the Apertis 2025.0 Linux distribution, originally created for automotive systems, but then reoriented for a wider range of electronic devices, embedded equipment and industrial equipment. Examples of devices where Apertis is used include the Atari VCS gaming console, Raspberry Pi 4 boards, R-car automotive SoCs and the Bosch D-tect 200 wall scanner . Reference system images are distributed for the x86_64, arm64 and armhf architectures. The distribution is modular and allows device manufacturers to independently form the necessary system environment filling. Formation of builds based on traditional deb packages and monolithic atomically updated images based on OSTree are supported. The maintenance period for each Apertis release is 1 year and 9 months, every three months a corrective release with error corrections is built. The distribution is based on packages from Debian GNU/Linux 12. Apertis allows you to create builds that do not include code under the GPLv3 family of licenses. Instead of using outdated versions of GNU utilities created before the transition to the GPLv3 license, Apertis uses more modern alternatives under permissive licenses. For example, instead of the GNU coreutils and findutils packages, Apertis offers analogs from the uutils project, written in the Rust language and distributed under the MIT license, and instead of GnuPG, Sequoia-PGP is supplied under the GPL-2+ and LGPL-2+ licenses. For those who do not care about the legal issues associated with GPLv3, the option of using traditional utility sets is left. The Apertis project adheres to the Debian development rules and includes only applications that are supplied under open licenses or allow free distribution. In order for companies creating their products based on Apertis to be sure of the license purity of derivative works, a SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) report is generated for each build, which indicates information about the licenses of all used code files, as well as data on program versions, which is also convenient for checking for vulnerable versions. https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/apertis-v2025-the-second-bookworm-based-release-for-industrial-embedded-devices.html

Linux terminal for Google Pixel devices: 08/03/2025 Google included the Linux Terminal app in the March Android 15 firmware update (“Pixel Feature Drop”) for Google Pixel devices. The app allows you to run a Debian GNU/Linux virtual machine in the Android environment, where you can run regular Linux applications. Linux Terminal is activated in the developer settings (section “Settings > System > Developer > Linux development environment”). For this option to appear, you need to activate the developer mode by quickly pressing the build number seven times on the “Settings → About Phone” page. After the first launch, the application offers to download a virtual machine image with Linux to the device, which takes up about 500 MB. The Terminal application is being developed in the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) repository in the core Android platform. The functionality of the Linux virtual machine is being developed within the Ferrochrome project. Debian GNU/Linux 12 is running in the guest environment. The AVF ( Android Virtualization Framework ) framework is used for virtualization, implemented, based off the KVM hypervisor and the crosvm toolkit . https://www.androidpolice.com/android-15-linux-terminal-app/

Nova driver starter code written in Rust is available for Linux kernel 6.15: 10/03/2025 A set of patches with an initial implementation of the Nova driver for NVIDIA GPUs written in Rust has been proposed for inclusion in the Linux 6.15 kernel, which is expected to be released in late May. At the first stage, the nova-core framework, which contains about 400 lines of code and implements a basic level of abstractions over the GSP firmware software interfaces, was transferred to the kernel. In addition to nova-core, the patch includes some bindings necessary for the drivers to work with the firmware. At the next stage, the kernel plans to include the nova-drm (Direct Rendering Manager) DRM driver for interaction with the GPU from user space, as well as the VFIO driver with the vGPU manager , which allows the use of NVIDIA virtual GPUs in virtualization systems. The Nova driver is designed for use with NVIDIA GPUs equipped with GSP firmware, which is used starting with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2000 series based on the Turing microarchitecture. In such GPUs, initialization and control operations are implemented in the firmware and are performed by a separate GSP (GPU System Processor) microcontroller. Nova is expected to replace the Nouveau driver for GPUs with GSP support in the long term. The project is being developed by Red Hat employees with the goal of getting rid of the complications inherent in the Nouveau DRM driver. Significant simplification is achieved by using ready-made handlers provided by the GSP firmware and dropping support for older GPUs. Nova will also solve architectural problems that require significant reworking of the code base in Nouveau, such as problems with locks in the VMM/MMU code. In addition to Nova, drivers for Apple AGX GPU (drm-asahi), NVMe (rnvme) and Android Binder are being developed in Rust for the Linux kernel. Cisco is developing the PuzzleFS file system for the Linux kernel in Rust . The QR code generator for the emergency stop screen, the rnull block device driver (replacement for null_blk) and the ax88796b_rust driver for the PHY interface of the ASIX AX887xx Ethernet controller have already been accepted into the kernel. https://lore.kernel.org/all/Z84dHHEn6xfvlRxk@cassiopeiae/T/%23u

FreeBSD 13.5 ReleaseD: 11/03/2025 After 6 months of development, FreeBSD 13.5 release has been published, which will be the last in the FreeBSD 13.x branch. Updates for FreeBSD 13.5 will be released until April 30, 2026. In parallel, the FreeBSD 14 branch is being developed, the next release (14.3) of which is scheduled for June 3, 2025. The first release of the FreeBSD 15 branch will be formed in December 2025. FreeBSD 13.5 installation images are generated for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64 and riscv64 architectures. Additionally, builds have been prepared for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and cloud environments Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Vagrant. https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.5R/announce/

Haiku Ports Latest Firefox, LibreWolf, and Thunderbird: 11/03/2025 Gerasim Troeglazov (3dEyes) has compiled fresh versions of the Firefox 136 browser, as well as the LibreWolf 136 browser based on this branch and the ThunderBird 136 email client. According to one Haiku developer, BeOS enthusiasts were among the inspirations for Firefox in the early 2000s. At the time, the Bezilla project was developing a port of the Mozilla Suite for BeOS. Since the suite was too bloated, the BeOS community tried to create a lightweight version based on it, which would leave only the browser and remove all other components, such as the email client and web page editor. Mozilla developers found the idea worthy of attention and released their own standalone version of the browser called Phoenix, later renamed Firebird due to overlap with the trademark, and then renamed Firefox again due to overlap with the name of a free DBMS. https://t.me/haiku_ru/151488

Mesa replaced the Nouveau OpenGL driver with Zink for new NVIDIA GPUs: 11/03/2025 Collabora has announced that a change has been adopted into the Mesa codebase that replaces the default OpenGL driver for NVIDIA GPUs starting with the Turing microarchitecture. The next release of Mesa 25.1 will replace the Nouveau (nvc0) OpenGL driver for GPUs with the Collabora-developed Zink OpenGL driver in conjunction with the NVK Vulkan driver. Compared to Nouveau, the Zink driver demonstrates higher performance in many tests and is not susceptible to the problems that Nouveau has when running on new NVIDIA GPUs. Zink provides an implementation of OpenGL 4.6 on top of Vulkan, enabling hardware-accelerated OpenGL on devices that support the Vulkan API. Zink's performance is close to that of native OpenGL implementations, allowing you to focus on providing high-quality Vulkan API support and implement OpenGL support on top of Vulkan instead of spending resources on maintaining separate OpenGL drivers. NVIDIA's Vulkan implementation is based on the NVK driver, which supports Vulkan 1.4 for NVIDIA Turing (GeForce GTX 16xx, RTX 20xx, and Quadro RTX series), Ampere (GeForce RTX 30xx and RTX A2000/4000/5000/6000 series), Ada (GeForce RTX 4xxx, RTX 4000 SFF, RTX 4xxx/5000/6000 Ada series), and newer microarchitectures. https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/goodbye-nouveau-gl-hello-zink.html

CrossOver 25.0 Released: 12/03/2025 After a year of development, CodeWeavers has released the Crossover 25.0 package, based on Wine code and designed to run programs and games written for the Windows platform. CodeWeavers is one of the key participants in the Wine project, sponsors its development and returns to the project all the innovations implemented for its commercial products. The source code of the open components of CrossOver 25.0 can be downloaded from their web page . https://www.codeweavers.com/support/forums/announce/?t%3D24;msg%3D322440%0D%0A

GStreamer 1.26.0 Available: 12/03/2025 After a year of development, GStreamer 1.26 is released, a cross-platform set of components for creating a wide range of multimedia applications, from media players and audio/video file converters to VoIP applications and streaming systems. The GStreamer code is distributed under the LGPLv2.1 license. Updates are also being developed for the gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-bad, gst-plugins-ugly plugins, as well as the gst-libav binding and the gst-rtsp-server streaming server. At the API and ABI level, the new release is backward compatible with the 1.0 branch. Binary builds will soon be prepared for Android, iOS, macOS and Windows (on Linux, they recommend you use packages from the distribution). https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/gstreamer-devel/2025-March/082142.html

The United Nations has proposed Open Source principles: 12/03/2025 The Open Source Initiative (OSI), an organization that reviews licenses for open source compliance, has formally endorsed the Open Source Principles, proposed by the United Nations (UN) to encourage collaboration and widespread adoption of open source code within UN entities and elsewhere. The principles were developed by Open Source United, a community organized by the UN Executive Board's Digital Network program, and provide a framework for the use, development, and dissemination of open source code throughout the organization. https://opensource.org/blog/osi-endorses-united-nations-open-source-principles

Ubuntu 25.10 to replace GNU Coreutils with uutils written in Rust: 13/03/2025 Jon Seager, Canonical's vice president of engineering and the technical lead for the Ubuntu project, has unveiled an initiative to replace Ubuntu's system utilities with Rust-based ones. The initiative's first goal is to move Ubuntu 25.10 to using the uutils toolkit by default instead of the GNU Coreutils suite. If the experiment is successful, uutils will also be used by default in the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS branch. The replacement will affect more than a hundred utilities included in Coreutils, including sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln and ls. Currently, uutils utilities are already used by default in the Debian-based Apertis distribution , as well as in the independent AerynOS (SerpentOS) distribution. Last week's release of the uutils coreutils package successfully passes 507 tests (506 in the previous release, 476 in the previous one) from the GNU Coreutils benchmark test suite. 69 tests failed, and 41 tests were skipped. In the coming weeks, work is also planned to begin on replacing the su and sudo utilities in Ubuntu with the sudo-rs package. Of the projects under consideration, zlib-rs and ntpd-rs are also mentioned. The reason for the migration is said to be the desire to improve the reliability and security of the utilities that underlie the distribution. Using Rust will reduce the risk of errors when working with memory, such as accessing a memory area after it has been freed and going beyond the buffer boundaries. According to John Seeger, protection against these errors will increase security guarantees, and with increased security, the overall reliability of the system will increase. It is noted that Canonical is considering various methods of improving quality, and one of them is the delivery of programs that are initially developed with an eye on security, reliability, and correctness. This is especially important for the basic components of the distribution, since if problems arise in low-level software, these problems are reflected in the work of all higher layers, for example, if there are problems with performance in the basic packages, they affect the performance of other subsystems. To test replacing system components in Ubuntu, the oxidizr project has been prepared, offering a command-line toolkit for managing system experiments related to replacing traditional utilities with alternatives written in Rust. Currently, oxidizr offers experiments for switching to the default use of the uutils coreutils, uutils findutils, uutils diffutils and sudo-rs packages. For example, to replace coreutils and findutils in your system, it is enough to run the command “sudo oxidizr enable –experiments coreutils findutils”, and to return to the original state, you can use the command “oxidizr disable”. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995

Cozystack Project Accepted into CNCF: 14/03/2025 The technical committee of the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), part of the Linux Foundation, approved the adoption of the Cozystack project, which develops a platform for building private clouds and PaaS. Cozystack has received the status of a CNCF sandbox project. The developers of Cozystack have begun the process of integration with the CNCF infrastructure. The Cozystack platform is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and allows you to build a cloud on your existing hardware for deploying “cloud native” and open source tools: managed Kubernetes clusters, DBaaS (database as a service), SaaS (application as a service) and virtual machines based on KubeVirt. Cozystack also provides a ready-made stack for monitoring and alerting built using Victoria Metrics, Victoria Logs, Grafana and Alerta. Cozystack can be used to provide services managed by Kubernetes, build geo-distributed clusters and organize the operation of databases deployed on separate equipment (bare metal). The non-profit organization CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) is part of the Linux Foundation and oversees cloud native projects such as Kubernetes, Etcd, Envoy, Prometheus, Cilium, Istio, K3s and FluxCD. To obtain the status of a CNCF main project, a project must go through the “Sandbox”, “Incubating” and “Graduated” stages. CNCF Sandbox is a kind of entry point for projects that want to join CNCF and become part of it. The project's move to CNCF gives Cozystack users a guarantee that the platform will always be available under the Apache 2.0 license and will not suffer the fate of projects such as Mongo, Redis, Terraform and Vault, whose licenses were changed to proprietary. In addition, the project's inclusion in CNCF, it will attract new developers and users, and make the project's management more transparent. https://github.com/cncf/sandbox/issues/322%23issuecomment-2697791780

Release of WebKitGTK 2.48.0: 14/03/2025 The release of a new stable branch WebKitGTK 2.48.0 is presented, a port of the WebKit browser engine for the GTK platform. WebKitGTK allows you to use all the capabilities of WebKit through a GNOME-oriented programming interface based on GObject and can be used to integrate web content processing tools into any applications, from using in specialized HTML/CSS parsers to creating full-featured web browsers. Among the well-known projects using WebKitGTK, there is the standard GNOME browser (Epiphany). Previously, WebKitGTK was used in the Midori browser, but after the project was transferred to the Astian Foundation, the old version of Midori on WebKitGTK was abandoned and a fundamentally different product was created with the same name Midori. https://webkitgtk.org/2025/03/14/webkitgtk2.48.0-released.html

GTK 4.18 is available: 15/03/2025 After six months of development, the multi-platform GUI toolkit, GTK 4.18 has been released. GTK 4 follows a development process that tries to provide application developers with a stable and supported API for several years that they can use without having to rework their applications every six months because of API changes in the next GTK branch. Among the most notable improvements in GTK 4.18 was an experimental backend has been added that allows running GTK applications on Android smartphones. The ability to use OpenGL for rendering on the Android platform has been implemented. The backend for the X11 protocol has been deprecated and is set to be discontinued in the GTK 5 branch. The deprecation is explained by the cessation of activity on the X11 protocol development and problems with maintainers - the backend is supported on a residual basis, since the existing GTK and GNOME developers are focused on Wayland. Due to stagnation in the backend development, it slows down the implementation of new features in GTK. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/tags/4.18.0

Debian 12.10 Release. First Stage of Debian 13 Freeze: 16/03/2025 The tenth corrective update of the Debian 12 distribution has been generated , which includes accumulated package updates and fixes to the installer. The release includes 66 updates with fixes for stability issues and 43 updates with fixes for vulnerabilities. Among the changes in Debian 12.10, we can note the update to the latest stable versions of the bup, intel-microcode, mariadb, postgresql-15, spamassassin, systemd and tzdata packages. The kanboard and libnet-easytcp-perl packages, which remained unmaintained and had security issues, were removed, as well as the looking-glass package, which was deemed unsuitable for a stable release. Additionally, it is worth noting that the Debian 13 “Trixie” branch has been moved to the first stage of freezing the package base. At the first stage of freezing, “transitions” (updating packages that require adjusting dependencies in other packages, which leads to temporary removal of packages from Testing) have been stopped, and updating packages necessary for building ( build-essential ) has been stopped. On April 15, 2025, a soft freeze of the package base will occur, stopping the acceptance of new upstream packages and preventing the re-inclusion of previously removed packages. On May 15, 2025, a hard freeze will be applied before the release, stopping the process of moving core packages and packages without autopkgtests from the unstable branch to testing completely, and beginning a phase of intensive testing and fixing of release-blocking issues. Some time after the hard freeze, a full freeze will be applied, covering all packages. Debian 13 is expected to be released in the second half of 2025. https://www.debian.org/News/2025/20250315

Release of GIMP 3.0.0: 17/03/2025 Seven years after the release of the 2.10 branch, the GIMP 3.0 graphics editor has been released. Ready-made builds have been published for Linux ( AppImage and Flatpak for x86_64 and ARM64). Builds for Windows and macOS are being prepared for publication. In preparation for future releases, it has been decided to move to a more predictable and frequent schedule of publishing new stable branches. In the future, the developers will not try to push many major changes at once, but will try to focus on polishing individual new features. The next major branch of GIMP 3.2, is planned to be published in about a year. In between major releases, corrective updates with bug fixes will be released. Among the most significant improvements in GIMP 3.0 : The transition to the GTK3 library, CSS-like style definition system and the use of client-side dialog window decoration (CSD, window title and frames are drawn not by the window manager, but by the application itself) was made. New widgets were proposed. Also, providing native support for working in environments based on the Wayland protocol. Then they added support for HiDPI and taking into account system scaling settings when generating the interface. The interface has been significantly modernized. Support for symbolic icon sets has been improved, and now automatically adjusts to the set foreground and background colors (when switching from light to dark mode, you no longer need to manually change the icon set). And many more! https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://github.com/GNOME/gimp/releases/tag/GIMP_3_0_0

Introducing TinyKVM for process-level virtualization: 17/03/2025 Varnish Software, a company that develops systems for building content delivery and caching networks, has introduced the open source TinyKVM project, that develops tools for isolating the execution of individual processes using the KVM hypervisor. The stated goal of the project is to create the fastest sandbox-isolation system for individual processes using hardware virtualization. The project code is written in C and C++ and is distributed under the GPLv3 license (for those who are not ready to comply with the requirements of GPLv3, a commercial license is provided). TinyKVM is designed to launch, isolated, any console programs for Linux with performance close to normal execution. The overhead for calling each system call is about 2 microseconds. Additional isolation of processes in caching systems and web request processing is mentioned as an example of the project's application. TinyKVM is designed to replace the libriscv emulator used to isolate the processing of each web request in the Varnish platform. Additionally, a version of the libvmod library has been created, allowing the execution of Varnish modules using TinyKVM. When running with TinyKVM, the machine code of programs is executed without emulation layers on the CPU and is limited using the KVM hypervisor API, which eliminates overhead and achieves performance close to that of running without virtualization https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/tinykvm-the-fastest-sandbox

New stable version of Vivaldi 7.2: 19/03/2025 The proprietary browser Vivaldi 7.2 has been released. It is being developed on the Chromium engine by former developers of the Opera Presto engine. Vivaldi builds are available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. The project distributes changes made to the Chromium code base under an open license. The browser interface is written in JavaScript using the React library, Node.js platform, Browserify, and various ready-made NPM modules. The interface implementation is available in source code, but under a proprietary license. The project aims to create a customizable and functional browser that preserves the privacy of user data. The main functions include a tracking and advertising blocker, note, history and bookmark managers, private browsing mode, end-to-end encrypted synchronization, tab grouping mode, sidebar, configurator with a large number of settings, horizontal tab display mode, and a built-in mail client, RSS reader and calendar in test mode. https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-on-desktop-7-2/

Release of elementary OS 8.0.1: 19/03/2025 The release of elementary OS 8.0.1 has been published. It is positioned as a fast, open, and privacy-conscious alternative to Windows and macOS. The project focuses on high-quality design aimed at creating an easy-to-use system that consumes minimal resources and provides high startup speed. Users are offered their own Pantheon desktop environment. Bootable iso images (3.3 GB) are available for download, available for the amd64 architecture (for a free download from the project's website, enter 0 in the donation amount field). When developing the original components of elementary OS, GTK3, the Vala language and its own Granite framework are used. The developments of the Ubuntu project are used as the base of the distribution. At the packages and repository support level, elementary OS 8.x is compatible with Ubuntu 24.04. All additional applications offered for installation through AppCenter, as well as some applications supplied by default, are packaged using the Flatpak format. The graphical environment is based on its own Pantheon shell, which combines such components as the Gala window manager (based on LibMutter), the Slingshot launcher, the Switchboard control panel, the Wing top panel, the Dock taskbar and the Pantheon Greeter session manager (based on LightDM). https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://blog.elementary.io/os-8-0-1-available-now/

SDL3 library with support for older systems: 19/03/2025 The author of the LDL (Little Directmedia Layer) graphics library and the ArcanumWorld game engine is developing the SDL3Lite project, aimed at recreating the SDL3 library with support for older architectures and operating systems, while maintaining compatibility with SDL3 at the C API level. With limited functionality, SDL3Lite already supports Linux, starting with Debian 3, and Windows 95. The system requirements for the graphics API include support for OpenGL 1.0, and for 2D rendering - OpenGL 1.2. In the future, the author plans to add support for Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS. The code is written in C++ and is distributed under the BSL (Boost Software License). https://github.com/JordanCpp/SDL3Lite

Ubuntu rebuilding performance increased: 19/03/2025 The results of the performance impact assessment of rebuilding packages for Ubuntu with different options and implementations of memory allocation functions have been published. The experimenter managed to increase the performance of the jq package with tools for processing data in the JSON format by 90% (1.9 times) by simply rebuilding it from the same package with the source code, without making any changes to the code itself. The performance was assessed by measuring the execution time of a typical filtering query over GeoJSON data, 500 MB in size. Results of the experiment: The version compiled in GCC from the same source code with default flags turned out to be 2-4% faster than the Ubuntu binary package. Rebuilding in Clang 18 with optimization level ”-O3“, enabling link-time optimizations (”-flto“) and disabling debug information (”-DNDEBUG“) resulted in a 20% speedup. Rebuilding with the TCMalloc memory allocation system (adding ”-L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu -ltcmalloc_minimal“ to LDFLAGS) resulted in a 40% speedup. Replacing malloc functions with tcmalloc , jemalloc and mimalloc memory allocation systems via “LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lib….so” resulted in 27%, 29% and 44% performance gains. When running with mimalloc, which showed a 44% speedup, the environment variable “MIMALLOC_LARGE_OS_PAGES=1” was set. Rebuilding the package with mimalloc in LDFLAGS instead of linking via LD_PRELOAD resulted in a 90% speedup in the test. Another test of processing 2.2GB of JSON data in 13,000 files also showed a roughly twofold performance increase. https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://gist.github.com/jwbee/7e8b27e298de8bbbf8abfa4c232db097

GNOME DE Release 48: 19/03/2025 After six months of development, the GNOME 48 desktop environment has been released. Specialized Live builds based on openSUSE and an installation image prepared by the GNOME OS initiative are available for a quick evaluation of GNOME 48's capabilities. GNOME 48 is also already included in experimental builds of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42. https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://foundation.gnome.org/2025/03/19/introducing-gnome-48/

Release of miracle-wm 0.5: 20/03/2025 Matthew Kosarek, a developer from Canonical, has released the miracle-wm 0.5 compositing manager, which uses the Wayland protocol and Mir compositing manager components. Miracle-wm supports tiling window layout, similar to the i3 and Sway projects. Waybar can be used as a panel. The project code is written in C++ and is distributed under the GPLv3 license. Ready-made builds are available in the snap format, as well as in rpm and deb packages for Fedora and Ubuntu . The goal of miracle-wm is to create a composite server that uses tiled window management, but is more functional and stylish than products like Swayfx. At the same time, the project allows you to use classic techniques for working with floating windows, such as placing individual windows on top of a tiled grid or pinning windows to a specific place on the desktop. Virtual desktops are supported with the ability to set a default window mode for each desktop (tiled layout or floating windows). It is expected that miracle-wm will be useful for users who prefer a tiled layout, but want visual effects and a more vivid graphical design with smooth transitions and colors. The configuration is defined in YAML format. To install miracle-wm, you can use the command “sudo snap install miracle-wm –classic”. https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://github.com/mattkae/miracle-wm/releases/tag/v0.5.0

Release of LosslessCut 3.65.0: 20/03/2025 LosslessCut 3.65.0 has been released. It provides a graphical interface for editing multimedia files without recoding the content. The most popular function of LosslessCut is cropping and trimming video and audio, for example, to reduce the size of large files shot on an action camera or a quadcopter camera. LosslessCut allows you to select relevant fragments of the recording in the file and discard the excess, without performing a full recoding and preserving the original quality of the material. Since the processing is performed by copying the existing data, and not recoding, the operations are very fast. LosslessCut is written in JavaScript using the Electron platform and is an add-on to the FFmpeg package. The code is distributed under the GPLv2 license. Builds are prepared for Linux ( snap , flatpak ), macOS and Windows. Without recoding, the program can also solve tasks such as attaching an audio track or subtitles to a video, cutting out individual scenes from videos (for example, cutting out commercials from TV program recordings), saving fragments linked to tags/chapters separately, regrouping video parts, dividing audio and video into different files, changing the type of multimedia container (for example, from MKV to MOV), saving individual video frames as images, creating thumbnails, exporting a fragment to a separate file, changing metadata (for example, location data, recording time, horizontal or vertical orientation). There are tools for detecting and automatically cutting out empty areas (black screen in video and fragments without sound in audio files), as well as linking to scene changes. You can combine fragments from different files, but the files must be encoded using the same codec and parameters. It is possible to edit individual parts with selective recoding of only the changed data, but leaving the rest of the information in the original video that was not affected by editing. During editing, rollback of changes (undo/redo) and display of the FFmpeg command log are supported (you can repeat typical operations from the command line without using LosslessCut). https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/releases/tag/v3.65.0

NVIDIA driver and GIMP 3.0 for Haiku OS: 21/03/2025 Ilya Chugin (X512) reported on the first results of porting the NVIDIA driver for the Haiku operating system. The port is still in its early stages of development, but is already suitable for simple rendering. The work involves an open kernel module from NVIDIA and the Vulkan driver NVK from Mesa. The Mesa driver NVK has been supplemented with support for the kernel-level NVIDIA driver instead of the Nouveau DRM driver. Libdrm and related components are not used in the port. The decision to use NVIDIA's code rather than the Nouveau driver was made based on ease of porting - the NVIDIA driver is designed to be portable and uses common code across Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris builds. The NVIDIA driver is also of higher quality and better supported. https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/haiku-nvidia-porting-nvidia-gpu-driver/16520

Google wants to reboot the kernel in the background: 21/03/2025 Engineers from Google have published a set of patches for discussion by Linux kernel developers with the implementation of the Live Update Orchestrator (LUO) subsystem, designed to update the kernel in Live mode. Unlike mechanisms such as livepatch, Ksplice, kpatch and kGraft, the new system is not limited to the ability to apply individual fixes to the running Linux kernel, but allows you to fully reboot and update the kernel without stopping the operation of individual devices. The project is based on a set of KHO (Kexec HandOver) patches to the kexec mechanism, used to load a new kernel from an already running Linux kernel without a physical reboot. The main application area of LUO is cloud environments, where it will be possible to update the KVM hypervisor without disrupting the operation of running virtual machines. In particular, it will be possible to suspend virtual machines while rebooting the kernel with the hypervisor, while keeping all devices attached to the virtual machines in working order. https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250320024011.2995837-1-pasha.tatashin@soleen.com/

Raspberry Pi system image generator: 21/03/2025 The developers of the Raspberry Pi project have presented the rpi-image-gen toolkit, designed to simplify the generation of custom system images for Raspberry Pi boards. The advantages of the toolkit include: fast assembly due to the use of ready-made binary packages; the use of identical versions of libraries and applications with the Raspberry Pi OS; the ability to configure an arbitrary partition layout and use file system encryption; support for generating a list of used packages and checking for the absence of vulnerable versions of programs. The code is written in Shell and is distributed under the BSD license. https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-rpi-image-gen-build-highly-customised-raspberry-pi-software-images/

ReactOS 0.4.15 Released: 22/03/2025 After more than three years of development, a new release of the ReactOS 0.4.15 operating system is presented, aimed at ensuring compatibility with Microsoft Windows programs and drivers, and also offering a Windows-style design. An installation ISO image (117 MB) and a Live build (in a zip archive 85 MB) are available for download. The project code is distributed under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2 licenses. “This release is a culmination of the work of numerous contributors since 0.4.14 was branched in 2020. This has been the largest release to date. There are nearly 8 times more commits going into this release than in 0.4.14. We are proud of the progress we have made, and are eager to continue with this growth” https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-0415-released/

NixOS offers a method to protect against backdoor substitution like XZ: 23/03/2025 A repeatable build mode is proposed for inclusion in the nixpkgs package repository used in the NixOS distribution, which allows identifying cases of backdoors being introduced into the code, reminiscent of the incident with the XZ project. The presented protection method allows detecting modifications in the archives with the source code of the release, which are absent from the repositories with the code. The essence of the method is that the source code of the new version of the application is assembled twice - the first time from the code downloaded from the git repository, and the second time from the code distributed in ready-made archives. If the resulting binary files differ from each other, there is reason to suspect the presence of hidden modifications in the repository or in the archive file with the code. https://github-com.translate.goog/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/391569?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Unprivileged application isolation system: 23/03/2025 The Landrun project has begun developing a new system for isolated execution of individual applications. The isolation uses the Linux Landlock kernel LSM module, which allows you to do without executing privileged operations during the creation of a sandbox environment. The way it works, Landrun is close to the Firejail utility, but differs in a simpler implementation, lightweight, and the ability to work under a regular unprivileged user without delivery with the suid flag. The project code is written in Go and is distributed under the GPLv2 license. The Landlock mechanism allows unprivileged programs to restrict the use of Linux kernel objects such as file hierarchies, network sockets, and ioctl. Unlike namespaces and system call filtering, the isolated environment is formed by the Linux kernel as an additional layer on top of the existing system access control mechanisms. To interact with the Landlock subsystem, the landrun utility uses the go-landlock library from the LandLock developers. https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://github.com/Zouuup/landrun

Release of Finnix 250: 23/03/2025 The release of the Finnix 250 Live distribution is presented, dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the project (the first version of Finnix was published on March 22, 2000). The distribution is based on Debian without a desktop environment and everything is done in the console and provides a selection of utilities for the needs of the system administrator. It includes more than 600 packages with all sorts of utilities. The size of the iso image is 528 MB. https://translate.google.com/website?sl=auto&tl=en&hl=en-US&client=webapp&u=https://blog.finnix.org/2025/03/22/finnix-250-released/