FreeDOS is an open-source operating system designed to be compatible with the now-defunct MS-DOS. Three decades have now passed since the FreeDOS project was first announced, and it is still alive and well with a small community of developers and users committed to running legacy DOS software, classic DOS games, and developing modern applications that extend its functionality well beyond the original MS-DOS. It may well be around in another 30 years.

The Free Software Foundation Europe has submitted a joint position to the European Commission (EC), claiming that Apple has failed to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). This is the law that requires Apple to support alternative application stores on the devices it makes.

Apple's unfair behaviour against Free Software highlights the critical need to monitor the implementation of the DMA. The FSFE collaborated with F-Droid, the AppFair project, and other interoperability experts to scrutinize Apple's DMA compliance, and it's impact on Free Software. Since then, we coordinated several expert workshops with stakeholders, discussed with regulators in FOSDEM, had official meetings with the EC's DMA team, and submitted a comprehensive position to the EC detailing several problematic elements in the Apple compliance that will harm the Free Software.

With the Rust-for-Linux project starting to gain some ground, it is worth looking at other operating systems that use Rust in their kernels. There are many attempts to use Rust for operating system development, but Redox may be the most complete. Redox is an MIT-licensed microkernel and corresponding user space, designed around concepts taken from Plan 9. While nowhere near being usable as a replacement for Linux, it already provides a graphical user interface and the ability to run many POSIX programs.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (pki-core), Debian (dlt-daemon and plasma-workspace), Fedora (emacs and kernel), Mageia (erofs-utils, libheif, libopenmpt, and wget), Red Hat (pki-core and python3), SUSE (frr), and Ubuntu (fontforge, sqlite3, and squid3).

The FreeBSD Foundation has published a set of reports from the May 2024 FreeBSD Developer Summit held in Ottawa, Canada. The topics include FreeBSD Core Team updates, FreeBSD 15 release planning, Integration with Rust, and OCI containers on FreeBSD:

Doug Rabson began by providing an overview of the current state of FreeBSD support for OCI containers, noting that while FreeBSD has long supported containers through its jail and vnet features, the ecosystem around OCI containers requires further development. "FreeBSD has been able to do containers for a long time, but we need to align better with OCI standards to make our containers more compatible and easier to use," Rabson remarked​​.

The academic and the Linux real-time and scheduling community mourns the premature death of Daniel Bristot de Oliveira. Daniel died at the age of 37 on Monday, June 24, 2024. Juri Lelli, Tommaso Cucinotta, Steve Rostedt, Kate Stewart, and Thomas Gleixner have come together to share their thoughts on his life and what he has left behind

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced the addition of three new members to its board: John Gilmore, Christina Haralanova, and Maria Chiara Pievatolo. This is part of FSF governance changes announced in January 2023. The next step is a review of current board members:

These three new members of the FSF's board of directors are the first to be appointed since 2020, when Odile Bénassy joined. Given the importance of the FSF to the free software movement, and the importance of its board to ensure preservation of the software freedom definition, the board has not taken its task lightly. Next, the FSF will evaluate current board members with the FSF's associate members in August, after which the voting members will review the feedback received and decide if each current board member should remain.

More information on the process, and a short biography of each new board member, is available in the full announcement.

It has been nearly one year since the first version of the device memory TCP patches was posted by Mina Almasry. Now on the 14th revision, this series appears to be stabilizing. Device memory TCP is a specialized networking feature requiring a certain amount of setup, but it could provide a significant performance improvement for some data-intensive applications.

An upgrade from Python 3.11 to 3.12 has led to the rejection of some Python apps by Apple's app stores. That led to Eric Froemling submitting a bug report against CPython. That, in turn, led to an interesting discussion among Python developers about how far the project was willing to go to accommodate app store review processes. Developers reached a quick consensus, and a solution that may arrive as soon as Python 3.13.

The 6.9.7, 6.6.36, and 6.1.96 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains an important set of fixes.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, kernel, libvpx, and linux-5.10), Fedora (chromium, firefox, freeipa, moodle, and openvpn), Oracle (git), Red Hat (golang and java-1.8.0-ibm), and Ubuntu (linux-oracle-6.5, netplan.io, openssl, plasma-workspace, ruby2.7, ruby3.0, ruby3.1, sqlite3, and wget).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 27, 2024 is available.

The openSUSE project has announced Leap Micro version 6.0. Leap Micro is an image-based, lightweight Linux distribution that is designed to run containerized and virtualized applications. It is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro. Changes in this release include the support for full-disk encryption, the addition of Cockpit for web-based system management, and an optional real-time kernel for x86_64. Boot support for legacy BIOS on x86_64 is deprecated with 6.0, and will be removed in a later release. See the SLE Micro release notes for more information.

Peter Hutterer has written a summary of "papercut fixes" for GNOME tablet support that are planned to ship with GNOME 47.

If you're an avid tablet user, you may have multiple stylus tools - but it's also likely that you have multiple tools of the same type which makes differentiating them in the GUI hard. Which is why they're highlighted now - if you bring the tool into proximity, the matching image is highlighted to make it easier to know which stylus you're about to configure. Oh, and in the process we added a new SVG for AES styli too to make the picture look more like the actual physical tool. The <blink> tag may no longer be cool but at least we can disco our way through the stylus configuration now.

Eric Sandeen led a filesystem-track session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit on completing the conversion of the existing kernel filesystems to use the mount API that was added for the 5.2 kernel in 2019. That API is invariably called the "new" API, which it is when compared to the venerable mount() system call, but it has been available for five years or so at this point without really pushing its predecessor aside. Sandeen wanted to discuss the status of the conversion process and some other questions surrounding the new API.

The Rust Blog is carrying an update on what the Rust Types Team has been up to and its near-future plans.

There has been a lot of work on the next-generation trait solver. The initiative posted a separate update at the end of last year. While we would have liked to stabilize its use in coherence a few months ago, this surfaced additional small behavior regressions and hangs, causing delays. We are working on fixing these issues and intend to merge the stabilization PR soon. We are getting close to compiling the standard library and the compiler with the new solver enabled everywhere, after which will be able to run crater to figure out the remaining issues.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (git, python3.11, and python3.9), Debian (chromium, emacs, git, linux-5.10, and org-mode), Fedora (libopenmpt, nginx-mod-modsecurity, and thunderbird), Mageia (emacs, python-ansible-core, and python-authlib), Oracle (git, python3.11, and python3.9), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and samba), and Ubuntu (ansible, cups, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, libheif, openvpn, roundcube, and salt).

Unison is a MIT-licensed programming language, in development since 2013, that explores the ramifications of making code immutable and stored in a database, instead of a set of text files. Unison supports a greatly simplified model for distributed programming — one that describes the configuration of and communication between programs in the same language as the programs themselves. Along the way, it introduces a new approach to interfacing with programming languages, which is tailored to its design.

Version 4.8.0 of the darktable photo editor has been released. Changes include performance improvements for large collections, addition of more EXIF fields in the image information module, and two new modules for image composition: Enlarge Canvas and Overlay. Enlarge Canvas allows adding areas to an image, while Overlay allows adding new content by overlaying pixels from the current image or another image. LWN last looked at darktable in 2022. Users are "strongly advised" to make a backup of their configuration and library before upgrading, as they will not be compatible with darktable 4.6.

Dan Walsh, Stef Walter, and Colin Walters all walk into a presentation and Walter asks, "why would you want to boot your containers?" This isn't the setup for some technology joke, this is part of the trio's keynote at DevConf.cz in Brno, Czech Republic on June 14 about bootable containers (bootc). The talk, which was streamed to YouTube for those of us who didn't attend DevConf.cz in person, provided a solid overview of bootc and the problems it is intended to solve. The idea behind bootc is to make creating operating-system images just as easy as creating application-container images while using the same tools.