Linux Weekly News

PHP 8.0 is on the horizon, and the project has imposed a feature-freeze for the release. There's one exception to the feature-freeze, though: the new attributes syntax. An attribute is syntactical metadata for PHP code, identical to what is called an "annotation" in other languages. Even […]

Version 2.32 of the GNU C Library (glibc) has been released. It contains support for Unicode 13.0.0, a new Kurdish/Sorani locale (ckb_IQ), support for audit modules listed in ELF sections of the executable, support for Synopsys ARC HS cores, new signal abbreviation and descriptive text […]

Security updates have been issued by Debian (clamav and json-c), Fedora (python2, python36, and python37), Red Hat (thunderbird), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), SUSE (java-11-openjdk, kernel, rubygem-actionview-4_2, wireshark, xen, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (openjdk-8 and ppp).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 6, 2020 is available.

Our look at running a CNC milling machine using open-source software led me to another tool worth looking at: FreeCAD. I wasn't previously familiar with the program, so I decided to check it out. In this article I will walk through my experiences with using FreeCAD for the first time to do a […]

This Mozilla Security Blog entry describes the new redirect-tracking protections soon to be provided by the Firefox browser. "ETP 2.0 clears cookies and site data from tracking sites every 24 hours, except for those you regularly interact with. We’ll be rolling ETP 2.0 out to all Firefox […]

We last looked at the idea of a Python "match" or "switch" statement back in 2016, but it is something that has been circulating in the Python community both before and since that coverage. In June it was raised again, with a Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) supporting it: PEP 622 […]

Security updates have been issued by Debian (net-snmp), Fedora (mingw-curl), openSUSE (firefox, ghostscript, and opera), Oracle (libvncserver and postgresql-jdbc), Scientific Linux (postgresql-jdbc), SUSE (firefox, kernel, libX11, xen, and xorg-x11-libX11), and Ubuntu (apport, grub2, grub2-signed, […]

The 5.7.13, 5.4.56, 4.19.137, and 4.14.192 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Version 7.0 of the LibreOffice office suite is out. It brings a long list of new features, including: "support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3; Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration for better performance; and carefully improved compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files". […]

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libx11, webkit2gtk, and zabbix), Fedora (webkit2gtk3), openSUSE (claws-mail, ghostscript, and targetcli-fb), Red Hat (dbus, kpatch-patch, postgresql-jdbc, and python-pillow), Scientific Linux (libvncserver and postgresql-jdbc), SUSE (kernel and […]

The Linux Foundation has announced the formation of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). The foundation aims to improve the security of open source software. "The OpenSSF brings together the industry’s most important open source security initiatives and the individuals and companies […]

Linus Torvalds released the 5.8 kernel on August 2, concluding another nine-week development cycle. By the time the work was done, 16,306 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository for this release. That happens to be a record, beating the previous record holder (4.9, […]

Version 1.5 of the Julia programming language has been released. On the Julia blog, Jeff Bezanson and Stefan Karpinski describe the highlights of the release, which includes struct layout improvements for decreasing heap allocations, stabilization of the multithreading API, faster random numbers, […]

Debian 10 "buster" received a fifth update. In addition to the usual security and bug fixes, this point release addresses Debian Security Advisory: DSA-4735-1 grub2. This security update covers multiple CVE issues regarding the GRUB2 UEFI SecureBoot 'BootHole' vulnerability.