Linux Weekly News

Version 7.1.0 of the VirtualBox virtualization system has been released. Changes include a major GUI update, a new Network Address Translation (NAT) engine with IPv6 support, shared clipboard support on Wayland, and more.

Debian does not have an official way to configure networking. Instead, it has four recommended ways to configure networking, one of which is the venerable ifupdown, which has been part of Debian since the turn of the century and is showing its age. A conversation about its maintainability and possible replacement with ifupdown‑ng has led to discussions about the default network-management tools for Debian "trixie" (Debian 13, which is expected in 2025) and beyond. No route to consensus has been found, yet.

Version 3.4 of the Pandoc document-conversion tool has been released. Notable changes in this release include a new ANSI output format (for console output), a switch to WeasyPrint as the PDF engine for HTML to PDF conversion, the ability to position captions above or below tables and figures, and much more.

Radicle 1.0 represents the culmination of years of experimentation and hard work from our team and community, where we set out to ensure that free and open source software ecosystems can flourish without having to rely on the whims of Big Tech. We designed Radicle with a first-principles approach, as a natural extension to Git, expanding it to work in a collaborative, local-first, peer-to-peer setting.

LWN looked at Radicle in March.

Version 0.9.0 of Redox OS, an open-source, Unix-like operating system written in Rust, has been released. Notable changes in this release include performance and stability improvements, better management of physical and virtual memory, bootloader improvements, and more. It also brings support for RustPython, Perl 5, Simple HTTP Server, the addition of several applications including GNU Nano, Helix, and the COSMIC Files, Editor, and Terminal applications. See the changelog section of the announcement for a full list of changes in the release.

How does Linux move from an awake machine to a hibernating one? How does it then manage to restore all state? These questions led me to read way too much C in trying to figure out how this particular hardware/software boundary is navigated.

And I wish I could say that things have calmed down, but I can't really say that. In fact, rc7 is slightly bigger than both rc6 and rc5 were, both in number of commits, and in actual diff size. That's not really how it should work out.

That said, there's nothing *scary* in here.

He is apparently "still waffling" about whether to release 6.11 next weekend, which would cause the 6.12 merge window to land on top of the Maintainers Summit, Linux Plumbers Conference, and Open Source Summit.

Code review is in high demand, and short supply, for most open-source projects. Reviewer time is precious, so any tool that can lighten the load is worth exploring. That is why Jesse Brandeburg and Kamel Ayari decided to test whether tools like ChatGPT could review patches to provide quick feedback to contributors about common problems. In a talk at the Netdev 0x18 conference this July, Brandeburg provided an overview of an experiment using machine learning to review emails containing patches sent to the netdev mailing list. Large-language models (LLMs) will not be replacing human reviewers anytime soon, but they may be a useful addition to help humans focus on deeper reviews instead of simple rule violations.

The NGINX team has announced that official NGINX open-source development has moved away from Mercurial to GitHub, and the project will now be taking contributions in the form of pull requests:

Additionally, starting today, we will begin accepting bugs reports, feature requests and enhancements directly through GitHub, under the "Issues" tab. Moreover, we've moved our community forums to the GitHub "Discussions" area, where you will now be able to engage in conversation, ask, and answer questions.

[...] We understand that changes like these may require adjustment, so to give you more time, we will continue accepting patches and provide community support via mailing lists until December 31st, 2024.