Internet News Section
The SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) library's codebase now includes a default change that enables operation based on the Wayland protocol in environments that support both Wayland and X11 simultaneously. Previously, in Wayland environments with the XWayland component, output was activated using X11 by default, and applications needed to be launched with special settings to use Wayland. This change will be part of the release […]
The first release candidate of the web framework and content management system Zotonic has been released. The project is written in Erlang and distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. Zotonic is based on the concept of organizing content as 'resources' (also known as 'pages') and 'relations' between them ('article' - 'relates to' - 'topic', 'user' - 'author' - 'article'), where the relations themselves are also resources of the type 'relation' […]
The release of the free document layout package Scribus 1.5.8 has been published. It provides tools for professional printing layout, including flexible PDF generation tools and support for working with separate color profiles, CMYK, spot colors, and ICC. The system is developed using the Qt toolkit and is distributed under the GPLv2+ license. Ready binary builds are prepared for Linux (AppImage), macOS, and […]
In the nightly builds of Firefox, which will form the basis for the Firefox 98 release scheduled for March 8, support for the Wayland protocol is enabled by default for user environments that provide support for it. You can check the use of Wayland in Firefox on the 'about:support' page. Among the remaining unresolved issues, there are problems with tab drag-and-drop stuttering, submenu alignment issues, and problems with setting environment variables […]
Qualys has discovered a vulnerability (CVE-2021-4034) in the Polkit system component (formerly PolicyKit), which is used in distributions to organize the execution of actions requiring elevated access rights by unprivileged users. The vulnerability allows an unprivileged local user to elevate their privileges to that of the root user, thus gaining full control over the system. The issue has been dubbed PwnKit and is notable for the availability of a working exploit that operates under […]
After a year and a half of development, version 1.10.0 of RetroArch has been released, a frontend for emulating various gaming consoles that allows for playing classic games through a simple, unified graphical interface. Emulators for consoles such as Atari 2600/7800/Jaguar/Lynx, Game Boy, Mega Drive, NES, Nintendo 64/DS, PCEngine, PSP, Sega 32X/CD, SuperNES, and more are supported. Gamepads from existing gaming consoles can be used, including […]
The Polkit toolkit, used in distributions for handling authorization and determining access rules for operations requiring elevated permissions (such as mounting USB drives), has added a backend that allows the use of the embedded JavaScript engine Duktape instead of the previously used Mozilla Gecko engine (by default, builds continue to use the Mozilla engine). The JavaScript language in Polkit is used to define access rules, which […]
After two years of work, the Khronos consortium, responsible for developing graphic standards, has published the Vulkan 1.3 specification, which defines the API for accessing GPU graphics and computing capabilities. The new specification incorporates corrections and extensions accumulated over the two years. It is noted that the requirements of the Vulkan 1.3 specification are aimed at graphics hardware of the OpenGL ES 3.1 class, which will ensure support for the new […]
After two months of development, the release of the distributed source code management system Git 2.35 has been published. Git is one of the most popular, reliable, and high-performance version control systems, providing flexible tools for nonlinear development based on branching and merging. To ensure the integrity of history and resistance to "backward" changes, implicit hashing of all previous history is used in each commit, […]
The release of the sane-backends package 1.1.1 has been prepared, which includes a set of drivers, the command-line utility scanimage, a daemon for organizing network scanning saned, and libraries implementing the SANE-API. The project's code is distributed under the GPLv2 license. The package supports 1747 (up from 1652 in the previous version) models of scanners, of which 815 (up from 737) have full support for all features, while 780 (up from 766) have a level of […]
Dmitry Zavalishin spoke about the project to port the Phantom operating system virtual machine to work in the microkernel OS Genode environment. The interview notes that the main version of Phantom is already ready for pilot projects, while the Genode-based version will be ready for application by the end of the year. However, only a functional conceptual version is currently announced on the project's website […]
The release of the JingOS 1.2 distribution is now available, providing an environment specifically optimized for installation on tablet PCs and laptops with touch screens. The project's developments are distributed under the GPLv3 license. Version 1.2 is available only for tablets with ARM architecture processors (previous releases were also made for x86_64 architecture, but after the launch of the JingPad tablet, all attention has shifted to ARM architecture). […]