Linux Weekly News

The Fedora Project switched to MariaDB as the default implementation of MySQL in Fedora 19 in 2013. Once a drop-in replacement for MySQL, MariaDB has diverged enough that this is no longer the case—and, despite concerns about Oracle and optimism that MariaDB would supplant MySQL, the reality is that MySQL and MariaDB seem to be here to stay. With that in mind, Fedora developer Michal Schorm proposed that the project revise the way MySQL and MariaDB are packaged in Fedora starting with Fedora 40.

The postmarketOS project, which produces a Linux distribution for phones and mobile devices, has announced that it is in the early stages of adding systemd to make it easier to support GNOME and KDE.

Users who prefer the OpenRC init system are assured they will still have that option when building their own images "as long as OpenRC is in Alpine Linux (on which postmarketOS is based)":

Proof-of-concept images are available now for a limited set of devices. Users are warned these images are "buggy, unreliable, and NOT suitable for use on a device you rely on". Those interested in helping with testing and development are encouraged to follow along and report bugs on the systemd issue at GitLab.

QUIC is a UDP-based transport protocol that forms the foundation of HTTP/3. It was initially developed at Google in 2012, and became an IETF standard in 2021. Work on the protocol did not stop with its standardization, however. The QUIC Working Group published several follow-up standards. Now, it is working on four more extensions to QUIC intended to patch over various shortcomings in the current protocol — although progress has not been quick.

It has long been possible to run multiple Python interpreters in the same process — via the C API, but not within the language itself. Eric Snow has been working to make this ability available in the language for many years. Now, Snow has published PEP 734 ("Multiple Interpreters in the Stdlib"), the latest work in his quest, and submitted it to the Python steering council for a decision. If the PEP is approved, users will have an additional option for writing performant parallel Python code.

So we finally have a week where things have calmed down, and in fact 6.8-rc7 is smaller than usual at this point in time. So if that keeps up (but that's a fairly notable "if") I won't feel like I need to do an rc8 this release after all.

So no guarantees, but assuming no bad surprises, we'll have the final 6.8 next weekend.

On February 29, the musl project announced release 1.2.5, including support for loongarch64 and riscv32. This release also contains support for the statx(), preadv2(), and pwritev2() system calls.

Tails 6.0 is now available. Based on Debian, Tails is a portable operating system designed to run from a USB stick and help users avoid surveillance and censorship. This release updates most Tails applications, and includes important security and usability improvements.

One major new feature in 6.0 is to provide warnings to users about errors when reading or writing to persistent storage. This release now ignores USB devices plugged in while the screen is locked, and removes some file and disk-wiping features from the Files application that are "not reliable enough" on USB sticks and SSDs to continue offering to users.

Users of Tails prior to 6.0~rc1 will need to do a manual upgrade to retain persistent storage. New users can download Tails for USB, or as an ISO to create a DVD or run Tails in a virtual machine.