News from the Planet

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research…

If anybody had told me I'd end up working on the very Linux desktop environment I've been daily-driving for the past three years, I probably wouldn't have believed them. This summer, I got to learn and work on the main Network Manager component used by default in KDE, the desktop environment relied…

On July 21, the kernel community lost Dan Williams, one of its most beloved contributors. Dave Hansen and Thomas Gleixner, both of whom worked with Williams extensively, have written an obituary and allowed LWN to publish it. He will be deeply missed, but he has left us with a lot to remember him…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (compat-openssl11, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, and sssd), Debian (exim4), Fedora (chromium, dotnet10.0, mbedtls, mupdf, netatalk, python-django5, skopeo, sssd, and wget1), Mageia (libevent and transmission), Oracle (.NET 8.0,…

Version 2.44 of the GNU C Library has been released. Changes include a new /etc/tunables.conf file for the system-wide setting of tunable parameters, a new tunable to control the use of transparent huge pages for read-only executable segments, a number of math-function improvements, a handful of…

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.12.98 stable Linux kernel with a single fix for a file descriptor leak in ext4. Users of the ext4 filesystem should upgrade.

I've performed a talk at the last three EMFs - so this time I decided to go purely as a tourist. It made things much more relaxing. No waking up from a stress dream that my laptop didn't work. No casually dropping my talk into every conversation to build up an audience. No queueing for the loos five…

--> --> Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! This week saw a bunch of work on some core infrastructure components, like the RDP server, login greeter, and screen configuration tooling. That’s in addition to lots of other good work, too: Notable new features Plasma 6.8 You can now…

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 17 to July 24. GNOME Core Apps and Libraries Image Viewer (Loupe) ↗ Browse through images and inspect their metadata. Sophie (she/her) says Image Viewer (Loupe) now shows color management information for an image if available.…

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.5, 6.18.40, 6.12.97, 6.6.145, 6.1.178, 5.15.212, and 5.10.261 stable Linux kernels. This batch of kernels includes a hefty set of updates, possibly the largest ever. 7.1.5-rc1, for example, included more than 2,000 patches,…

Registration is now open for the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, to be held October 5 to 7 in Prague, Czechia. Tickets to this event tend to sell out quickly, so interested attendees probably should not procrastinate.

So it will not play cyberpunk 2077, but if you prefer opensource drivers for your hardware, nouveau is certainly an option for some opensource gaming. Using kernel 7.0 from debian backports, I could run opensource classics requiring 3D acceleration flawlessly with nouveau: Supertux (Debian…

Fedora contributor Simon de Vlieger has published a blog post with a walkthrough of how the project turns source code and packages into the final release that users install on their systems. It follows the a package from a packager's git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container…

I would first like to mention and thank everyone for being so welcoming and open-minded to the interns and for the non-interns who also attended GUADEC for the first time. I hope to become a familiar face to everyone.     The GNOME Foundation clearly goes out of their way to gather as many people…

About a month ago Anthony Green added a novel “call plan” to libffi. This allows one to cache the hard work of determining what to do once and skip all of that work in subsequent calls. You can read more of the details on their article about it. The best case for me was about a 25% reduction in…

Hello everyone! Once again, I am here to share my fun experiences incorporating new features for Mankala.ProblemThis time I have built a bot server for Mankala where you can automate the entire game process of playing the game moves by using the server endpoints present in the bot. This Mankala bot…

Daniel Borkmann led a session at the 2026 Linux Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about the progress that has been made with netkit, the subsystem that allows virtual machines (VMs) running on Linux to perform networking efficiently. When that did not fill the full time, he went on to…

The Open Home Foundation, which governs the Home Assistant home-automation project, has announced the "public preview" of its Device Database: Providing a public, open way to browse the anonymous, aggregated device data we collect was always part of the plan, and this preview is our first step…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (glibc, java-21-openjdk, kernel, and libpq), Debian (imagemagick, spice-vdagent, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (cryptlib, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, firefox, python-black, python-lsp-black, and python-pytokens), Mageia (apache, cifs-utils, dnsmasq, lrzip, and…

Discover the final QGIS 3D crowdfunding results, featuring instanced 3D point rendering, anti-aliasing, adaptive tiling, and enhanced scene lighting.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-30. Online Friends Are Real Friends Tags: tech, internet, culture, life, friendship Indeed, friends we make online are no less real than the ones we see in the flesh first. I would know… guess how I made friends with KDE…

I didn't care for this book. It attempts to interweave botanical and cultural history with an autobiography and ends up doing neither particularly well. For every dose of poetry about the far-flung and exotic journey of the fruit, there's a dull recitation of facts from Wikipedia. Occasionally…

Killing Processes One of the features of systemd that is most controversial is the option to kill user processes when the user logs out. That initially killed screen/tmux/nohup processes too. In recent Debian releases the default configuration of systemd-logind (the login manager for systemd) is to…

My Current Thinkpad In 2018 I reviewed a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen6 that was assigned to me for work [1]. In April last year I wrote about the failings of my Thinkpad Yoga Gen 3 and how I was going back to the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 [2]. The Gen5 in question has 8G of RAM and a 1920*1080 display…

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is home to more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, all powered by a vibrant, global community of contributors. Among these projects, Apache Iceberg has emerged as a cornerstone of modern data architecture, revolutionizing how organizations manage…