Blog Section
The GNOME Shell user interface and the Mutter compositor have been fully transitioned to use the GTK4 library, eliminating the hard dependency on GTK3. Additionally, the dependency gnome-desktop-3.0 has been replaced with gnome-desktop-4 and gnome-bg-4, while libnma has been updated to libnma4. Overall, GNOME still remains tied to GTK3, as not all applications and libraries have been ported to GTK4. For example, on GTK3 […]
A group of German researchers, developers, and cryptographers has published the first release of the Rosenpass project, which develops a VPN and key exchange mechanism resistant to attacks from quantum computers. The transport used is VPN WireGuard with standard encryption algorithms and keys, while Rosenpass complements it with means of key exchange secured against hacking by quantum computers (i.e., Rosenpass additionally secures key exchange, not […]
An experimental release of the open implementation of WinAPI — Wine 8.3 has been announced. Since the release of version 8.2, 29 bug reports have been closed, and 230 changes have been made. The most significant changes include: support for smart cards implemented through a PCSC-Lite layer. Low Fragmentation Heap support has been added for memory allocation. The Zydis library has been included for more accurate […]
The release of the PortableGL 0.97 project has been published, developing a software implementation of the OpenGL 3.x graphics API, written entirely in C (C99). Theoretically, PortableGL can be used in any applications that accept a texture or frame buffer as input data. The code is formatted as a single header file and is distributed under the MIT license. The stated goals include portability, compliance with the OpenGL API, ease of use, […]
The release of the Thorium 110 project has been published, developing a periodically synchronized fork of the Chromium browser, enhanced with additional patches for performance optimization, improved usability, and increased security. According to tests by Thorium's developers, it outperforms stock Chromium by 8-40% in performance, primarily due to the inclusion of extra optimizations during compilation. Ready builds are available for Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi, and Windows. The main differences are […]
The release of strongSwan 5.9.10 is now available, a free package for creating VPN connections based on the IPSec protocol, used in Linux, Android, FreeBSD, and macOS. The new version fixes a critical vulnerability (CVE-2023-26463) that can be exploited to bypass authentication but could also potentially lead to the execution of attacker's code on the server or client side. The issue occurs when verifying specially crafted certificates […]
Maíra Canal from Igalia presented a project to rewrite the VGEM (Virtual GEM Provider) driver in Rust. VGEM includes around 400 lines of code and provides a hardware-agnostic backend for GEM (Graphics Execution Manager), used for shared access to buffers of software 3D device drivers such as LLVMpipe, to enhance the performance of software rasterization. VGEM […]
After six months of development, the release of the cross-platform interpreter for classic adventures, ScummVM 2.7.0, has been presented. This replaces executable files for games and allows many classic games to be played on platforms for which they were not originally intended. The project code is distributed under the GPLv3+ license. A total of more than 320 adventures can be run, including games from LucasArts, Humongous Entertainment, Revolution Software, Cyan, and […]
After four years of development, the release of the free game engine Godot 4.0 has been published, suitable for creating 2D and 3D games. The engine supports an easy-to-learn scripting language for game logic, a graphical environment for game design, one-click game deployment, extensive animation and physics simulation capabilities, an integrated debugger, and a performance bottleneck identification system. The game engine code […]
GitHub has announced the launch of a free service to track accidental publication of confidential data in repositories, such as encryption keys, database passwords, and API access tokens. Previously, this service was only available to beta testing program participants, but it is now being provided without restrictions to all public repositories. To enable the check for your repository, go to the settings in the section […]
After six months of development, the multimedia package FFmpeg 6.0 is now available, which includes a set of applications and a collection of libraries for operations on various multimedia formats (recording, converting, and decoding audio and video formats). The package is distributed under the LGPL and GPL licenses, and FFmpeg development runs concurrently with the MPlayer project. Notable changes introduced in FFmpeg 6.0 include: The ffmpeg build has been made mandatory […]
The release of the toolkit for organizing isolated environments, Bubblewrap 0.8, is now available. It is mainly used to limit the operations of individual applications by unprivileged users. In practice, Bubblewrap is used by the Flatpak project as a layer for isolating applications run from packages. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the LGPLv2+ license. Traditional Linux container virtualization technologies are used for isolation, based on […]