Debian's proposed tag2upload service would be worthy of an article even if it wasn't so contentious; tag2upload promises a streamlined way for Debian developers using Git to upload packages to the Debian Archive. But tag2upload has been in limbo for years due to disagreement and a communication breakdown between the team behind tag2upload and the ftpmasters team. It took the threat of a General Resolution (GR), weeks of discussion, and more than 1,000 emails to finally move forward.

The Universal Blue project, which produces operating system images based on Fedora's Atomic Desktops, has issued an announcement that manual steps are required to continue receiving updates. Jorge Castro wrote:

If you use Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora, or any other Universal Blue image (including our toolboxes) then you need to follow the instructions in this announcement in order to ensure that your device is getting updates. We were rotating our cosign keypairs this morning, which is the method that we use to sign our images.

During this process I made a critical error which has resulted in forcing you to take manual steps to migrate to our newly signed images.

This applies to all Universal Blue images released before July 2, 2024. See the full announcement for instructions. LWN covered Bluefin in December, 2023.

Version 4.10.0 of GNU findutils has been released. Notable changes include allowing find -name / as a valid pattern, and accepting larger UIDs/GIDs for find -user and find -group. It is also once again possible to build findutils on systems with musl-libc.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (golang and kernel), Fedora (ghostscript and openssh), Mageia (espeak-ng), Red Hat (389-ds, c-ares, container-tools, cups, fontforge, go-toolset, iperf3, less, libreoffice, libuv, linux-firmware, nghttp2, openldap, pki-core, python-idna, python-jinja2, python-pillow, python3, python3.11-PyMySQL, qemu-kvm, and xmlrpc-c), SUSE (ghostscript, git, libndp, libxml2, openssh, pgadmin4, podman, podofo, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, python39, squid, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (firefox and openvpn).

FreeDOS is an open-source operating system designed to be compatible with the now-defunct MS-DOS. Three decades have now passed since the FreeDOS project was first announced, and it is still alive and well with a small community of developers and users committed to running legacy DOS software, classic DOS games, and developing modern applications that extend its functionality well beyond the original MS-DOS. It may well be around in another 30 years.

The FreeBSD Foundation has published a set of reports from the May 2024 FreeBSD Developer Summit held in Ottawa, Canada. The topics include FreeBSD Core Team updates, FreeBSD 15 release planning, Integration with Rust, and OCI containers on FreeBSD:

Doug Rabson began by providing an overview of the current state of FreeBSD support for OCI containers, noting that while FreeBSD has long supported containers through its jail and vnet features, the ecosystem around OCI containers requires further development. "FreeBSD has been able to do containers for a long time, but we need to align better with OCI standards to make our containers more compatible and easier to use," Rabson remarked​​.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced the addition of three new members to its board: John Gilmore, Christina Haralanova, and Maria Chiara Pievatolo. This is part of FSF governance changes announced in January 2023. The next step is a review of current board members:

These three new members of the FSF's board of directors are the first to be appointed since 2020, when Odile Bénassy joined. Given the importance of the FSF to the free software movement, and the importance of its board to ensure preservation of the software freedom definition, the board has not taken its task lightly. Next, the FSF will evaluate current board members with the FSF's associate members in August, after which the voting members will review the feedback received and decide if each current board member should remain.

More information on the process, and a short biography of each new board member, is available in the full announcement.

An upgrade from Python 3.11 to 3.12 has led to the rejection of some Python apps by Apple's app stores. That led to Eric Froemling submitting a bug report against CPython. That, in turn, led to an interesting discussion among Python developers about how far the project was willing to go to accommodate app store review processes. Developers reached a quick consensus, and a solution that may arrive as soon as Python 3.13.

The 6.9.7, 6.6.36, and 6.1.96 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains an important set of fixes.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, kernel, libvpx, and linux-5.10), Fedora (chromium, firefox, freeipa, moodle, and openvpn), Oracle (git), Red Hat (golang and java-1.8.0-ibm), and Ubuntu (linux-oracle-6.5, netplan.io, openssl, plasma-workspace, ruby2.7, ruby3.0, ruby3.1, sqlite3, and wget).

The openSUSE project has announced Leap Micro version 6.0. Leap Micro is an image-based, lightweight Linux distribution that is designed to run containerized and virtualized applications. It is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro. Changes in this release include the support for full-disk encryption, the addition of Cockpit for web-based system management, and an optional real-time kernel for x86_64. Boot support for legacy BIOS on x86_64 is deprecated with 6.0, and will be removed in a later release. See the SLE Micro release notes for more information.

Peter Hutterer has written a summary of "papercut fixes" for GNOME tablet support that are planned to ship with GNOME 47.

If you're an avid tablet user, you may have multiple stylus tools - but it's also likely that you have multiple tools of the same type which makes differentiating them in the GUI hard. Which is why they're highlighted now - if you bring the tool into proximity, the matching image is highlighted to make it easier to know which stylus you're about to configure. Oh, and in the process we added a new SVG for AES styli too to make the picture look more like the actual physical tool. The <blink> tag may no longer be cool but at least we can disco our way through the stylus configuration now.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (git, python3.11, and python3.9), Debian (chromium, emacs, git, linux-5.10, and org-mode), Fedora (libopenmpt, nginx-mod-modsecurity, and thunderbird), Mageia (emacs, python-ansible-core, and python-authlib), Oracle (git, python3.11, and python3.9), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and samba), and Ubuntu (ansible, cups, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, libheif, openvpn, roundcube, and salt).

Version 4.8.0 of the darktable photo editor has been released. Changes include performance improvements for large collections, addition of more EXIF fields in the image information module, and two new modules for image composition: Enlarge Canvas and Overlay. Enlarge Canvas allows adding areas to an image, while Overlay allows adding new content by overlaying pixels from the current image or another image. LWN last looked at darktable in 2022. Users are "strongly advised" to make a backup of their configuration and library before upgrading, as they will not be compatible with darktable 4.6.

Dan Walsh, Stef Walter, and Colin Walters all walk into a presentation and Walter asks, "why would you want to boot your containers?" This isn't the setup for some technology joke, this is part of the trio's keynote at DevConf.cz in Brno, Czech Republic on June 14 about bootable containers (bootc). The talk, which was streamed to YouTube for those of us who didn't attend DevConf.cz in person, provided a solid overview of bootc and the problems it is intended to solve. The idea behind bootc is to make creating operating-system images just as easy as creating application-container images while using the same tools.

GhostBSD is a desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD and the MATE Desktop Environment. The goal of the project is to lower the barrier to entry of using FreeBSD on a desktop or laptop system, and it largely succeeds at this. While it has a few rough edges that make it hard to recommend for the average desktop user, it is a fine choice for users who want a desktop with FreeBSD underpinnings such as the Z File System (ZFS), and the Ports (source) and Packages (binary) software collections.

Philip Hazel was 51 when he began the Exim message transfer agent (MTA) project in 1995, which led to the Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) project in 1998. At 80, he's maintained PCRE, and its successor PCRE2, for more than 27 years. For those doing the math, that's a year longer than LWN has been in publication. Exim maintenance was handed off around the time of his retirement in 2007. Now, he is ready to hand off PCRE2 as well, if a successor can be found.

Version 1.28 of the MATE Desktop has been released.

MATE 1.28 has made significant strides in updating the codebase, including the removal of deprecated libraries and ensuring compatibility with the latest GTK versions. One of the most notable improvements is the enhanced support for Wayland, bringing us closer to a fully native MATE-Wayland experience. Several components have been updated to work seamlessly with Wayland, ensuring a more integrated and responsive desktop environment.

See the announcement for a full list of improvements and bug fixes.

Version 1.11.0 of Libgcrypt, a general-purpose library of cryptographic building blocks, has been released by the GnuPG project:

This release starts a new stable branch of Libgcrypt with full API and ABI compatibility to the 1.10 series. Over the last years Jussi Kivilinna put again a lot of work into speeding up the algorithms for many commonly used CPUs. Niibe-san implemented new APIs and algorithms and also integrated quantum-resistant encryption algorithms.