Linux Weekly News

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.

I've been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I'd welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.

With the printk bits merged, PREEMPT_RT could be enabled on X86, ARM64 and Risc-V. These three architectures merged required changes over the years leaving me in a position where I have no essential changes in the queue that would affect them.

Congratulations are due to the many developers who have worked on this project for the last two decades.

OpenSnitch is an "interactive application firewall". Like other firewalls, it uses a series of rules to decide what network traffic should be permitted. Unlike many other firewalls, though, OpenSnitch does not ask the user to create a list of rules ahead of time. Instead, the list of rules can be built up incrementally as applications make connections — and the user can peruse both the rules that have built up over time, and statistics on the connections that have been attempted.

The TAB exists to provide advice from the kernel community to the Linux Foundation and holds a seat on the LF's board of directors; it also serves to facilitate interactions both within the community and with outside entities. Over the last year, the TAB has overseen the organization of the Linux Plumbers Conference, advised on the setup of the kernel CVE numbering authority, worked behind the scenes to help resolve a number of contentious community discussions, worked with the Linux Foundation on community conference planning, and more.

Nominations are due by September 20.

Version 4.0 of the Tellico collection-management software has been released. This is the first release to use the KDE Frameworks 6 and Qt6 libraries, with a fallback available for Frameworks 5 and Qt5. Other notable changes in 4.0 include importing video collections from file metadata and correctly importing multi-disc album data from Discogs, MusicBrainz, and iTunes. Users of prior versions are advised to make a backup of their data before upgrading.

The 6.10.8, 6.6.49, 6.1.108, 5.15.166, 5.10.225, 5.4.283, and 4.19.321 stable kernel updates have all been released. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the tree. Users of those kernels should upgrade.

Version 130.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Notable in this release is the addition of a Firefox Labs tab in Firefox Settings. This allows users to easily enable experimental features, such as the ability to translate selected text portions to different languages after a full-page translation, and add an AI chatbot to the sidebar. Firefox 130 also addresses several security issues, adds 11 new languages to its translation support, and more.

One of the joys of writing about technology is the opportunity to cover interesting talks on open‑source and free‑software topics. One of the pains is creating transcriptions of said talks, or continually referring back to a recording, to be able to write about them. Speech Note is an open-source application that uses machine-learning models, running locally, to translate speech to text and take the pain out of transcription. It also handles text to speech, and language translations. While not perfect, its transcriptions are better than one might expect, even when handling jargon, accents, and less-than-perfect audio.

At this year's GUADEC in Denver, Colorado, Behdad Esfahbod and Matthias Clasen presented a two-part talk on a topic that's deeply important to desktop environments: fonts. Esfahbod covered advances in font technology that are making their way to becoming standards, and Clasen briefly discussed improvements in GTK text rendering. The talk presented some fascinating insights into the problems around accurately rendering writing systems on the desktop, and where font technologies may be going in the near future.