The Universal Blue project has announced the release of Bluefin LTS, an image-based distribution similar to Bluefin that uses CentOS Stream 10 and EPEL instead of Fedora as its base:

Bluefin LTS ships with Linux 6.12.0, which is the kernel for the lifetime of release. An optional hwe branch with new kernels is available, offering the same modern kernel you'll find in Bluefin and Bluefin GTS. Both vanilla and HWE ISOs are available, and you can always choose to switch back and forth after installation. [...]

Bluefin LTS provides a backported GNOME desktop so that you are not left behind. This is an important thing for us. James has been diligently working on GNOME backports with the upstream CentOS community, and we feel bringing modern GNOME desktops to an LTS makes sense.

Version 7.0 of the Tails portable operating system has been released. This is the first version of Tails based on Linux 6.12.43, Debian 13 ("trixie") and GNOME 48. It uses ztsd instead of xz to compress the USB and ISO images to deliver a faster start time on most computers. The release is dedicated to the memory of Lunar, "a traveling companion for Tails, a Tor volunteer, Free Software hacker, and community organizer":

Lunar has always been by our side throughout Tails' history. From the first baby steps of the project that eventually became Tails, to the merge with Tor, he's provided sensible technical suggestions, out-of-the-box product design ideas, outreach support, and caring organizational advice.

Outside of Tor, Lunar worked on highly successful Free Software projects such as the Debian project, the Linux distribution on which Tails is based, and the Reproducible Builds project, which helps us verify the integrity of Tails releases.

See the changelog for a full list of fixes, upgraded applications, and removals. LWN covered Tails Project team leader intrigeri's DebConf25 talk in July.

• Front: Fighting human trafficking; End of 10; Link tags; Healthy subsystem communities; New kernel tools; Rust and Carbon; Typst.
• Briefs: Brief news items from throughout the community.
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Ian Jackson has published a blog post summarizing the tag2upload service's first month of handling uploads for the upcoming Debian 14 ("forky") release:

We announced tag2upload's open beta in mid-July. That was in the middle of the the freeze for trixie, so usage was fairly light until the forky floodgates opened.

Since then the service has successfully performed 637 uploads, of which 420 were in the last 32 days. That's an average of about 13 per day. For comparison, during the first half of September up to today there have been 2475 uploads to unstable. That's about 176/day.

So, tag2upload is already handling around 7.5% of uploads. This is very gratifying for a service which is advertised as still being in beta!

LWN covered tag2upload in July 2024.

Version 2.15.0 of libxml2 has been released. Notable changes include the disabling of Python bindings by default, using Doxygen to generate API documentation, as well as bringing HTML serialization and handling of character encodings more in line with the HTML5 specification.

Nick Wellnhofer has also announced that he is stepping down as libxml2 maintainer, and Iván Chavero has volunteered to take over. LWN covered libxml2 in June.

Systemd v258 has been released with a long list of new features and changes; slice units now have basic workload management features, quotas for tmpfs have been added, the "systemctl start" command now has a verbose (-v) option, and more. This release also, finally, completely removes support for control groups v1 support. LWN covered some of systemd v258's features and changes in August.

In October, consumer versions of Windows 10 will stop receiving security updates. Many users who would ordinarily move to the next version are blocked by Windows 11's hardware requirements unless they are willing to buy a newer PC. The "End of 10" campaign is an effort to convince those users to switch to Linux rather than sticking with an end-of-life operating system or buying a new Windows system. At Akademy 2025, Dr. Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss, Bettina Louis, Carolina Silva Rodé, and Nicole Teale discussed their work on the campaign, its progress so far, and what's next.

Safe, ergonomic interoperability between Rust and C/C++ was a popular topic at RustConf 2025 in Seattle, Washington. Chandler Carruth gave a presentation about the different approaches to interoperability in Rust and Carbon, the experimental "(C++)++" language. His ultimate conclusion was that while Rust's ability to interface with other languages is expanding over time, it wouldn't offer a complete solution to C++ interoperability anytime soon — and so there is room for Carbon to take a different approach to incrementally upgrading existing C++ projects. His slides are available for readers wishing to study his example code in more detail.

A malicious update to @ctrl/tinycolor (2.2M weekly downloads) was detected on npm as part of a broader supply chain attack that impacted more than 40 packages spanning multiple maintainers.

The compromised versions include a function (NpmModule.updatePackage) that downloads a package tarball, modifies package.json, injects a local script (bundle.js), repacks the archive, and republishes it, enabling automatic trojanization of downstream packages.

There is some more information in this Krebs on Security article.

Brooke Deuson is the developer behind Trafficking Free Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization that produces free software to help law enforcement combat human trafficking. She is a survivor of human trafficking herself. She spoke at RustConf 2025 about her mission, and why she chose to write her anti-trafficking software in Rust. Interestingly, it has nothing to do with Rust's lifetime-analysis-based memory-safety — instead, her choice was motivated by the difficulty she faces getting police departments to actually use her software. The fact that Rust is statically linked and capable of cross compilation by default makes deploying Rust software in those environments easier.

The move also comes with a name change due to legal difficulties in securing the Varnish Cache name:

The new association and the new project will be named "The Vinyl Cache Project", and this release 8.0.0, will be the last under the "Varnish Cache" name. The next release, in March will be under the new name, and will include compatility scripts, to make the transition as smooth as possible for everybody.

I want to make it absolutely clear that this is 100% a mess of my making: I should have insisted on a firm written agreement about the name sharing, but I did not.

I will also state for the record, that there are no hard feelings between Varnish Software and the FOSS project.

Varnish Software has always been, and still is, an important and valued contributor to the FOSS project, but sometimes even friends can make a mess of a situation.