Internet News Section
System76, the developer of the Pop!_OS Linux distribution, has introduced the third alpha version of the COSMIC desktop environment, written in Rust (not to be confused with the old COSMIC, which was based on GNOME Shell). ISO images for systems with NVIDIA GPUs (3 GB) and Intel/AMD (2.6 GB), built on the test build of the Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution, are offered for testing. Ready-made packages are also available for […]
Researchers from Google Project Zero and Google DeepMind have published a report on the development of the AI system Big Sleep, built on the large language model Gemini 1.5 Pro and designed to identify vulnerabilities in source code. A major achievement of the project was the discovery, using Big Sleep, of the first exploitable and previously unknown vulnerability in an existing project. The vulnerability was identified in […]
A test release of the Xfce 4.20 Pre1 desktop environment has been published, aimed at providing a classic desktop environment that requires minimal system resources to operate. The Xfce 4.20 branch has entered a freeze stage, which prohibits the addition of new features to core components and shifts developers' focus to stabilizing the existing codebase. Before the release, scheduled for December 15, another […]
A new, improved version of the powerful single-board computer Raxda Rock 5b+ with the RK3588 chipset and NVME SSD support has been released. This single-board computer can serve as an effective and inexpensive solution for experimentation and development. The 8GB version, with delivery to Russia, will cost around $110. After purchase, you can immediately install the EDK2 bootloader, which will allow you to install any distribution for ARM64, including […]
Adrian Vovk, the creator of the atomically updatable distribution carbonOS and installer for GNOME OS, as well as one of the developers of systemd-homed and systemd-sysupdate, announced an initiative to transform GNOME OS from a distribution for GNOME testers and developers into a general-purpose distribution suitable for daily use by ordinary users. Adrian also stated that the development of the carbonOS distribution will be discontinued in […]
In the nightly builds of Firefox, which will form the release of Firefox 134 on January 7, testing has begun on the updated address bar, which includes a button for selecting a search engine, similar to the button in the menu added to the panel of a separate search bar. In addition to the ability to quickly send a query to the desired search engine, the menu displayed when clicking the new button also […]
Josh Poimboeuf from Red Hat has published a patch for the Linux kernel that speeds up the "per_thread_ops" test by 2.6%, which measures the number of operations that can be performed in a single thread. The patch uses pointer masking to reduce the number of slow barrier_nospec() calls in the 64-bit function copy_from_user(), which is used to copy data into the kernel from user space. Linus Torvalds […]
Qucs-S is a program for simulating analog electronic circuits. You can use either Ngspice for general-purpose schematics or QucsatorRF (included with Qucs-S) for microwave devices as the simulation engine. On October 31, this year, the next release 24.4.0 was presented. The main new features of this release include: a utility for viewing Touchstone (SnP) files has been added (see screenshot). This file format […]
Bradley M. Kuhn, executive director and co-founder of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), has criticized the recently published definition of Open Source AI by the OSI (Open Source Initiative). According to Kuhn, the OSI rushed to publish the final version of the definition and approved it without extensive discussion at the initial stage […]
The Sculpt project version 24.10 has been released, advancing the operating system built on the Genode OS Framework technologies, which can be used by regular users to perform everyday tasks. The project's source code is distributed under the AGPLv3 license. A LiveUSB image is available for download, with a size of 32 MB. It supports operation on systems with Intel processors and graphics subsystems with VT-d and VT-x extensions enabled, as […]
A new version of the tooling for creating isolated environments, Bubblewrap 0.11, has been released. This tool is used to restrict individual applications of unprivileged users. In practice, Bubblewrap is used by the Flatpak project as a layer for isolating applications run from packages. Isolation uses traditional Linux container virtualization technologies based on cgroups, namespaces, Seccomp, and SELinux. The project's code is written […]
The specialized distribution Tails 6.9 (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) has been released, developed as part of the Tor project. The distribution is based on the Debian 12 package base, comes with the GNOME 43 desktop, and is intended for anonymous internet access using the Tor toolkit. All connections, except for traffic through the Tor network, are blocked by the packet filter by default. User data […]