Linux Weekly News

The 6.12.10, 6.6.72, and 6.1.125 stable kernels have been released on the expected schedule.

• Front: Chimera Linux; Vim; Page-table hardening; Modifying system calls; Ghostty 1.0; TuxFamily.
• Briefs: rsync vulnerabilities; Linux Mint 22.1; Git v2.48.0; Libvirt v11.0.0; Rust 1.84.0; RIP Helen Borrie, Paolo Mantegazza, and Bill Gianopoulos; SFC lawsuit; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Ghostty terminal emulator project has generated a surprising amount of interest, even before code was released to the public. This is in part due to the high profile of its creator, HashiCorp founder Mitchell Hashimoto. Its development was conducted behind closed doors for beta testing, until version 1.0 was released on December 26 under the MIT license. While far from finished, Ghostty is ready for day-to-day use and might be of interest to those who spend significant amounts of time at the command line.

Version 11.0.0 of the libvirt virtualization API has been released. Notable changes in this release include the ability to export virtiofs filesystems in read-only mode, the addition of support for vlan tagging and trunking of network interfaces with the network, qemu, and lxc drivers, as well as a number of bug fixes.

We have just now received word of the passing of Helen Borrie, a longtime contributor to the Firebird relational database project.

She will be greatly missed. (Thanks to Steve Friedl.)

Linux Mint version 22.1, a long-term-support (LTS) release with support until 2029, is now available. Notable changes in this release include a transition to Aptkit for background package management tasks, Captain to install Debian packages, and a new default theme with improved Wayland compatibility. See the release notes for known issues.

Nick Tait announced on the oss-security mailing list that rsync, the widely used file transfer program, had a number of serious vulnerabilities. Users can mitigate all six vulnerabilities by upgrading to version 3.4.0, which was released on January 14. While all users should upgrade, servers that use rsyncd are especially impacted:

The Mastodon project has announced that founder Eugen Rochko will be transferring "key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets)" to a new non-profit organization:

Practically Mastodon will remain headquartered in and operate from Europe primarily. We will continue day-to-day operations through the Mastodon GmbH for-profit entity, which will become wholly owned by the new European not-for-profit entity. The Mastodon GmbH entity automatically became a for-profit as a result of its charitable status being stripped away in Germany. The existing US-based non-profit entity, the 501(c)(3), will continue to function as a fundraising hub.

[...] We are in the process of a phased transition. First we are establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership and stewardship. We are taking the time to select the appropriate jurisdiction and structure in Europe. Then we will determine which other (subsidiary) legal structures are needed to support operations and sustainability.

Rochko has, naturally, also posted about the transition on Mastodon.social.

TuxFamily is a French free-software-hosting service that has been in operation since 1999. It is a non-profit that accepts "any project released under a free license", whether that is a software license or a free-content license, such as CC-BY-SA. It is also, unfortunately, slowly dying due to hardware failures and lack of interest. For example, the site's download servers are currently offline with no plan to restore them.

Hans de Goede has posted an update about his work to support IPU6 cameras on Fedora and submitting fixes upstream.

The initial IPU6 camera support landed in Fedora 41 only works on a limited set of laptops. The reason for this is that with MIPI cameras every different sensor and glue-chip like IO-expanders needs to be supported separately.

I have been working on making the camera work on more laptop models. After receiving and sending many emails and blog post comments about this I have started filing Fedora bugzilla issues on a per sensor and/or laptop-model basis to be able to properly keep track of all the work.

LWN covered the lack of IPU6 drivers in 2022.

Chimera Linux is a new distribution designed to be "simple, transparent, and easy to pick up". The distribution is built from scratch, and recently announced its first beta release. While the documentation and installation process are both a bit rough, the project already provides a usable desktop with plenty of useful software — one built primarily on tools adopted from BSD.