UNIX and more

FOSS picks for now

a pair of stories

hardware picks

5 Android phones you should buy instead of the Galaxy Z Fold 7

Raspberry Pi Imager 1.9.6, an easy-to-use SD card preparation tool by Raspberry Pi

Last week NVIDIA open-sourced 12k lines of C header files for Blackwell GPUs to help in the open-source driver efforts, namely for Nouveau / NVK and the in-development NOVA Rust driver. On Friday they made public some additional header files for helping in the Blackwell and Hopper open-source driver enablement...

Lubuntu is a fast, no-frills Linux distribution for the masses - and it's perfect for reviving older hardware

Free and Open Source Software

The biggest question our man in Italy has about Linux distros and other open source software projects taking political stances is

At DebConf25 in Brest, France, the talk "When Free Software Communities Unite: Tails, Tor, and the Fight for Privacy" was delivered by a man who introduced himself only as intrigeri. He delivered an overview of the Tor Project, its mission, and the projects under the umbrella. He also spoke about how the organization depends on Debian, and plans for the software it delivers.

With the Mesa 25.2 open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics driver code having been branched last week ahead of its stable release in August, I carried out some fresh benchmarks on AMD's exciting Strix Halo platform using the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics to see where the Linux performance is now at for the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-1.8.0-openjdk), Debian (angular.js and batik), Fedora (chromium, pypy, screen, unbound, wine, and wine-mono), Mageia (djvulibre, quictls, and redis), Red Hat (avahi, gnome-remote-desktop, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk with Extended Lifecycle Support, java-21-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, python-setuptools, redis, and valkey), SUSE (chromedriver, coreutils, cosign, docker, FastCGI, ffmpeg-4, fractal, gimp, glib2, ImageMagick, iputils, java-17-openjdk, java-24-openjdk, jq, kubelogin, kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, kubernetes1.26, python-requests, python3, rmt-server, rustup, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (apache2).

The EROFS read-only file-system ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window has been working on metadata compression support to allow for even smaller container image sizes but at the cost of higher I/O latency...

It was nearly a decade ago when the first RISCV64 port was started for Debian, reports Phoronix. But one of the big features planned for Debian 13.0 (planned for 9 August) is supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture. This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware. A Debian RISC-V BoF session was held at this week's DebConf25 conference in France to discuss the state of RISCV64 for Debian Linux. The talk was led by Debian developers Aurelien Jarno and Bo YU... RV64GC is the current target for Debian RISC-V and using UEFI-based booting as the default. Over seventeen thousand source Debian packages are building for RISC-V with Trixie... Those wishing to learn more about this current state of Debian for RISC-V can see the PDF slide deck from DebConf25.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Breaking on Friday afternoon was word that Intel is shutting down its Clear Linux project effective immediately after ten years of maintaining this high performance Linux distribution that relentlessly optimized for the best Linux x86_64 performance -- even when it benefited AMD x86_64 processors too. Here is a look back at the most popular of our Clear Linux testing over its decade in existence as a high performance Intel Linux OS...

The LLVM compiler toolchain has begun upstreaming support for Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" as a new means of handling ThinLTO compilations for leveraging link-time optimizations...

At last week's DebConf25 Debian developer conference in France, Rust packaging within Debian Linux was talked about by Fabian Grünbichler. There an interesting statistic was shared around the growing expanse of Rust usage within Debian and the open-source ecosystem at large...

HarfBuzz 11.3 released on Sunday as the newest release of this open-source text shaping engine. HarfBuzz 11.3 brings some nice performance improvements for this text shaping engine that is used by many prominent software programs and toolkits like Google Chrome, Firefox, GNOME / GTK, KDE / Qt, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, Godot, and many closed-source programs too like Adobe Photoshop and others...

The Mozilla Firefox 141.0 release binaries are out today for this monthly update to this cross-platform, open-source web browser...