Blog Section
System76, the developer of the Pop!_OS Linux distribution, has unveiled the fifth alpha version of the COSMIC desktop environment, written in Rust (not to be confused with the older COSMIC based on GNOME Shell). ISO images with the latest version of COSMIC are available for testing, built on top of the alpha builds of the upcoming Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution for systems with NVIDIA (2.9 GB) and Intel/AMD (2.5 GB) GPUs. Also […]
After two and a half years of development, a new stable version of the Flatpak toolkit 1.16 has been released, providing a system for building self-contained packages independent of specific Linux distributions and running in a special container that isolates the application from the rest of the system. Flatpak package execution support is provided for Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Linux Mint, Alt Linux, and Ubuntu. Packages with Flatpak […]
On January 9, version 2.34.0 of the cross-platform console utilities fastfetch and flashfetch was released, written in C and distributed under the MIT license. These utilities are designed to output system information similar to neofetch. They support Linux, Android, FreeBSD, macOS, SunOS, and Windows 7+. Unlike fastfetch, flashfetch does not support extended information output capabilities, profiles, and more. Change log: […]
The specialized distribution Tails 6.11 (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 environment, and is designed for anonymous internet access using the Tor toolkit. By default, all connections except traffic through the Tor network are blocked by a packet filter. For storing user […]
After eight months of development, version 0.38 of the console utility nwipe has been released, designed for securely wiping the contents of disks using various wiping methods and pseudorandom number generators. It can wipe a single disk or multiple disks simultaneously. The utility is written in C using the ncurses library for the text interface and is distributed under the GNU GPL 2.0 license. Change log […]
The release of the free document layout package Scribus 1.6.3 has been announced. The package provides tools for professional layout of printed materials, includes tools for generating PDF, and supports working with separate color profiles, CMYK, spot colors, and ICC. The program is written using the Qt toolkit and is released under the GPLv2+ license. Ready binary builds are available for Linux (AppImage), macOS, and Windows. […]
Information has been revealed about a vulnerability (CVE-2024-5594) in the OpenVPN package for creating virtual private networks, which can lead to arbitrary data being injected into third-party executable files or plugins in the system on the other side of the connection. The vulnerability is caused by the lack of checking for null bytes and invalid characters when processing control messages such as PUSH_REPLY. The issue has been resolved in OpenVPN versions 2.5.11 […]
On January 6, version 1.7.4 of the high-performance speech recognition system whisper.cpp was released, implementing the Whisper model from OpenAI, written in C and C++ and distributed under the MIT license. The project uses the proprietary machine learning tensor library GGML, written in C and optimized for various backends (CUDA, Vulkan, BLAS, SYCL, OpenCL, etc.). Changelog: […]
On January 6, version 4.3.0 of one of the fastest JSON read and write libraries, written in C++ (header-only, C++23 standard) and distributed under the MIT license, was released. It also supports CSV and BEVE formats. Changelog: Added compile-time option (and wrapper) append_arrays, which appends data to types similar to std::vector without overwriting them: std::vector v{}; constexpr glz::opts append_opts{.append_arrays […]
The release of the OrangePi Neo gaming console, jointly developed by Orange Pi and the Manjaro Linux distribution community, is scheduled for the first quarter of 2025. The device is equipped with a 7-inch display (1920 x 1200, 120Hz), an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U or 8840U CPU, 16GB or 32GB of RAM, from 512GB to 2TB NVMe SSD, and two USB 4.0 ports, audio […]
After three months of development, version 0.25.0 of the cross-platform console utility for viewing bat files has been released, written in Rust and distributed under the MIT or Apache 2.0 license. The utility supports syntax highlighting for 174 ($ bat -L) programming and markup languages. Key changes: Displaying the filename in the terminal header when the Paging option is not equal to Paging::Never. bat […]
OpenRC is an initialization system for Linux systems that replaces systemd in distributions like Gentoo and Alpine Linux. The master branch of the openrc repository has added functionality necessary for launching services in a user session using this initialization system. Configuration files and initialization scripts for user services are located in the following directories: /etc/user/init.d ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/rc/init.d /etc/user/conf.d ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/rc/conf.d ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/rc/rc.conf ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/rc/runlevels All […]