Internet News Section
After eight months of development, the new version 3.0.0 of the advanced editor for LaTeX documents TeXstudio is now available. Among the new features are faster document parsing, which should reduce the time needed to open them; spell checking is now performed asynchronously; the custom syntax highlighting for mathematical and verbatim environments has been replaced with a cwl-based approach; improved support for 'dark' mode; […]
A specialized distribution release of Tails 4.10 (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) has been formed, based on the Debian package base and designed to ensure anonymous access to the network. Anonymous access in Tails is provided by the Tor system. All connections, except for traffic through the Tor network, are blocked by the packet filter by default. For storing user data in the data preservation mode between sessions, […]
The release of the Firefox 80 web browser has taken place. In addition, updates have been made for the long-term support branches 68.12.0 and 78.2.0. Firefox 68.12 ESR is the last in its series, and users of Firefox 68 will be offered an automatic update to the 78.3 release in a month. The Firefox 80 version for Android is delayed. The Firefox 81 branch will enter beta testing soon, with a release that […]
The day of August 24, 1995, marked the official presentation of the legendary Windows 95, which brought graphical user interface operating systems to the masses and made Microsoft widely known. After 25 years, let’s try to understand what made 'the Wind' win the hearts of billions of users around the world. One of the most important features of Windows 95 was that it allowed the operating system […]
The developers of the NetBSD project announced the inclusion of the wg driver with WireGuard protocol implementation into the core of NetBSD. NetBSD has become the third OS after Linux and OpenBSD to integrate support for WireGuard. Additionally, companion commands for VPN configuration have been offered — wg-keygen and wgconfig. In the default kernel configuration (GENERIC), the driver is currently not activated and requires explicit indication in […]
The release of the lightweight window manager IceWM 1.8 is now available. IceWM features full keyboard shortcut management, the ability to use virtual desktops, taskbars, and application menus. The window manager is configured through a quite simple configuration file, allowing for the use of themes. Built-in applets for monitoring CPU, memory, and traffic are available. Several third-party GUI tools for configuration and workspace implementation are being developed separately […]
The implementation of the ZFS file system in the main branch of FreeBSD (HEAD) has been transitioned to using OpenZFS code, which develops the codebase of 'ZFS on Linux' as the reference version of ZFS. In spring, FreeBSD support was moved to the main OpenZFS project, after which all related changes to FreeBSD continued to be developed there, enabling FreeBSD developers to promptly implement changes into the system […]
Firefox 80 is now available. There is a new feature allowing users to set Firefox as the system's default PDF viewer. The loading and processing of lists of malicious and problematic extensions has been significantly sped up. This feature will be ported to the ESR version, as maintaining two different 'blacklist' formats is cumbersome, and the developers were unable to incorporate the change into the 78 release (on which the current ESR branch is based) due to a last-minute issue […]
On August 25, 1991, after five months of development, 21-year-old student Linus Torvalds announced in the comp.os.minix newsgroup the creation of a working prototype of the new operating system Linux, marking the completion of the porting of bash 1.08 and gcc 1.40. The first public release of the Linux kernel was presented on September 17. Kernel 0.0.1 was 62 KB in compressed form and contained […]
The release of the Linux distribution Armbian 20.08 has been presented, providing a compact operating environment for various single-board computers based on ARM processors, including different models of Odroid, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, pine64, Nanopi, and Cubieboard using Allwinner, Amlogic, Actionsemi, Freescale / NXP, Marvell Armada, Rockchip, and Samsung Exynos processors. The builds are based on Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian 10 repositories, […]
The registrar APNIC, responsible for the distribution of IP addresses in the Asia-Pacific region, has published the results of an analysis of traffic distribution on one of the root DNS servers a.root-servers.net. 45.80% of the queries to the root server were related to checks performed by browsers based on the Chromium engine. Thus, almost half of the resources of root DNS servers are spent on performing diagnostic checks for Chromium rather than processing requests from DNS servers during […]
A new version of the XMPP client Kaidan 0.6.0 is available. The program is written in C++ using Qt, QXmpp, and the Kirigami framework. The code is distributed under the GPLv3 license. Builds have been prepared for Linux (AppImage and flatpak) and Android. The release of builds for macOS and Windows is delayed. A key improvement in the new version is the implementation of an offline message queue—messages are now stored […] when there is no network connection.