Vue lecture
[$] RVKMS and Rust KMS bindings
game-changer for the kernel", noting that the reasons are not related to the oft-mentioned, "headline" feature of the language: memory safety.
Blender 4.3 released
Brush assets, faster sculpting, a revolutionized Grease Pencil, and more. Blender 4.3 got you covered."
Plans for CHICKEN 6
CHICKEN Scheme, a portable Scheme compiler, is gearing up for its next major release. Maintainer Felix Winkelmann has shared an article about what changes to expect in version 6 of the language, including better Unicode support and support for the R7RS (small) Scheme standard.
Every major release is a chance of fixing long-standing problems with the codebase and address bad design decisions. CHICKEN is now nearly 25 years old and we had many major overhauls of the system. Sometimes these caused a lot of pain, but still we always try to improve things and hopefully make it more enjoyable and practical for our users. There are places in the code that are messy, too complex, or that require cleanup or rewrite, always sitting there waiting to be addressed. On the other hand CHICKEN has been relatively stable compared to many other language implementations and has a priceless community of users that help us improving it. Our users never stop reminding us of what could be better, where the shortcomings are, where things are hard to use or inefficient.
Security updates for Wednesday
Rocky Linux 9.5 released
FreeCAD 1.0 released
Since the very beginnings, the FreeCAD community had a clear view of what 1.0 represented for us. What we wanted in it. FreeCAD matured over the years, and that list narrowed down to just two major remaining pieces: fixing the toponaming problem, and having a built-in assembly module.Well, I'm very proud to say those two issues are now solved.
[$] Book review: Run Your Own Mail Server
The most common piece of advice given to users who ask about
running their own mail server is don't. Setting up
and securing a mail server in 2024 is not for the faint of heart, nor
for anyone without copious spare time. Spammers want to flood inboxes
with ads for questionable supplements, attackers want to abuse servers
to send spam (or worse), and getting the big providers to accept mail
from small servers is a constant uphill battle. Michael W. Lucas,
however, encourages users to thumb their nose at the "Email
Empire
", and declare email independence. His self-published book,
Run Your Own Mail
Server, provides a manual (and manifesto) for users who are
interested in the challenge.
Incus 6.7 released
This is another one of those pretty well rounded releases with new features and improvements for everyone". New features include automatic cluster rebalancing, DHCP improvements, and more.
Security updates for Tuesday
[$] Development statistics for 6.12
Security updates for Monday
The 6.12 kernel has been released
No strange surprises this last week, so we're sticking to the regular release schedule, and that obviously means that the merge window opens tomorrow.".
Headline features in this release include: support for the Arm permission overlay extension, better compile-time control over which Spectre mitigations to employ, the last pieces of realtime preemption support, the realtime deadline server mechanism, more EEVDF scheduler development, the extensible scheduler class, the device memory TCP work, use of static calls in the security-module subsystem, the integrity policy enforcement security module, the ability to handle devices with a block size larger than the system page size in the XFS filesystem, and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.12 page for more details.
A new package manager for OpenWrt
This new package manager offers a number of advantages over the older opkg system and is a significant milestone in the development of the OpenWrt platform. The older opkg package manager has been deprecated and is no longer part of OpenWrt." There is some more information on this page.
[$] Two approaches to tightening restrictions on loadable modules
[$] Fedora KDE gets a promotion
The Fedora Project is set to welcome a second desktop edition to its lineup after months (or years, depending when one starts the clock) of discussions. The project recently decided to allow a new working group to move forward with a KDE Plasma Desktop edition that will sit alongside the existing GNOME-based Fedora Workstation edition. This puts KDE on a more equal footing within the project, which, it is hoped, will bring more contributors and users interested in KDE to adopt Fedora as their Linux distribution of choice.
Security updates for Friday
PyPI now supports digital attestations
The Python Package Index (PyPI) has announced that it has finalized support for PEP 740 ("Index support for digital attestations"). Trail of Bits, which performed much of the development work for the implementation, has an in-depth blog post about the work and its adoption, as well as what is left undone:
One thing is notably missing from all of this work: downstream verification. [...]
This isn't an acceptable end state (cryptographic attestations have defensive properties only insofar as they're actually verified), so we're looking into ways to bring verification to individual installing clients. In particular, we're currently working on a plugin architecture for pip that will enable users to load verification logic directly into their pip install flows.