Blog Section
The release of the free documentation system GNU Texinfo 7.0 has been announced. Originally developed by Richard Stallman, it is used to prepare documentation for GNU projects. GNU Texinfo defines a special markup format for formatting documentation and allows you to convert the source document into various formats for publication and printing, such as PDF, HTML, DVI, Info, DocBook, XML, etc. In this new release, significant enhancements have been made.
An update to the Yuzu project has been released, featuring an emulator for the Nintendo Switch gaming console, capable of running commercial games designed for this platform. The project is based on the developers of Citra, the Nintendo 3DS emulator. Development is carried out through reverse engineering of the Nintendo Switch hardware and firmware. Yuzu's code is written in C++ and is distributed under the GPLv3 license. Ready-to-use builds are available for Linux (flatpak) and other systems.
Veeam, a company that produces software for backup and disaster recovery, has proposed to include in the Linux kernel the blksnap module, which implements a mechanism for creating snapshots of block devices and tracking changes in these devices. A command-line utility called blksnap and the library blksnap.so have been prepared for working with snapshots, allowing user space to interact with the kernel module through ioctl calls.
The release of the Wolvic web browser has been announced, designed for use in augmented and virtual reality systems. The project continues the development of the Firefox Reality browser, which was previously developed by Mozilla. After stagnation of the Firefox Reality codebase, its development has been continued under the Wolvic project by the company Igalia, known for its contributions to free projects such as GNOME, GTK, WebKitGTK, Epiphany, GStreamer, Wine, Mesa, and others.
The release of Portmaster 1.0 has been announced, an application for managing a firewall that provides access blocking and traffic monitoring at the level of individual programs and services. The project’s code is written in Go and is distributed under the AGPLv3 license. The interface is implemented in JavaScript using the Electron platform. It is compatible with both Linux and Windows. In Linux, traffic inspection and management is performed using specific tools.
A new Static Linux distribution has been prepared, based on Alpine Linux, musl libc, and BusyBox, and is notable for being delivered as an image that runs from RAM and can be booted directly from UEFI. The image includes the JWM window manager, Firefox, Transmission, and data recovery utilities such as ddrescue, testdisk, and photorec. Currently, 210 packages have been statically assembled, but this number will increase in the future […]
After a year of development, the GNU project has released the free electronic payment system GNU Taler 0.9, which provides anonymity for buyers while allowing seller identification to ensure transparent tax reporting. The system does not track where users spend their money but provides means to track incoming funds (the sender remains anonymous), addressing inherent issues with BitCoin […]
A corrective release of the Pixman library 0.42.2 has been published, which is used for low-level graphics rendering in many open projects, including X.Org, Cairo, Firefox, and composite managers based on the Wayland protocol. The new version fixes a dangerous vulnerability (CVE-2022-44638) that leads to a buffer overflow when processing pixel data with parameters that can cause integer overflow. Researchers have released a proof-of-concept exploit, […]
The release of project BK 3.13.2211.10133 is now available, developing an emulator for 16-bit home computers BK-0010-01, BK-0011, and BK-0011M that were produced in the 1980s, which are command compatible with PDP-11 computers, SM EVM, and DVK. The emulator is written in C++ and is distributed in source code. The general license for the code is not explicitly stated, but LGPL is mentioned in some files, and […]
Lennart Pottering continued to publish ideas on reworking components for loading Linux and reviewed the situation regarding the duplication of boot partitions. There was discontent with the use of two disk partitions with different file systems for initial boot organization, which are mounted nested — the /boot/efi partition based on VFAT file system with EFI firmware components (EFI System Partition) and the /boot partition based on ext4 file system, […]
The NT Center for IT ROSA has released a corrective update for the freely distributed and community-developed ROSA Fresh 12.3 distribution, built on the rosa2021.1 platform. Builds for free download have been prepared for the x86_64 platform in versions with KDE Plasma 5, LXQt, GNOME, Xfce, and without a GUI. Users who already have the ROSA Fresh R12 distribution installed will receive the update automatically. […]
A corrective release of Firefox 106.0.4 is now available, which has fixed several issues: crashes during video playback with digital rights management (DRM), inability to fill in the date input field when dynamically changing the field type from date to datetime-local, and crashes when playing multimedia content. A few days ago, release 106.0.3 was also formed which fixed two […]