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OMG! Ubuntu

Firefox 156 reduces CPU usage when viewing JPGs

Firefox 156 is out with faster start-up times for its built-in PDF viewer and lower CPU usage when viewing large JPEG images. This is the second release since Mozilla moved to a twice-monthly release schedule. As you browse the web you (pretty much always) see images smaller than their native resolution. To wit, if I embed a 4K JPEG in this post, for example, you don’t see it at full size: it’s downscaled to fit on the page. Same amount of pixel data, but squeezed by CSS. In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo’s IDCT scaling to reduce images […]

LWN.net

GNU Core Utilities 9.12 released

Pádraig Brady has announced GNU Core Utilities (coreutils) version 9.12. "There have been 288 commits by 16 people in the 21 weeks since 9.11". New features include an -A option for uname which labels all output, as well as adding awareness of the failfs and nullfs file types to stat and tail. There are many in this release as well, including a fix for a bug "present in 'the beginning'" that caused some utilities to fail when traversing hierarchies if files are being removed in parallel.

LWN.net

[$] Lessons learned as the Debian Project Leader

What is it like to be a Debian Project Leader (DPL), or a former one? According to Andreas Tille, who stepped down this year after two consecutive terms as DPL, you'd have to be one to know. At the recent MiniDebConf in Winterthur, Switzerland, Tille spoke about what he learned while serving as DPL, some of the initiatives he led, mistakes that he made, and his thoughts on the general resolution (GR) on large language model (LLM) usage in Debian.

OMG! Ubuntu

Conflux icon set gives a modern look to Linux desktops

Conflux is a new Linux icon set that aims to be both beautiful but neutral – I think it succeeds at both. The author of Conflux said they struggled to find a “modern-looking” icon pack for their desktop, deigning many as overly stylistic, outdated or, in some cases, poorly designed. Another impetus to solve was the way un-themed icons look. “Conflux should blend seamlessly into your system”, reads the Github page, “so that you don’t even notice you’re using an icon theme.” Few of us use the same set of apps, and few icons sets cover every thing (not least […]

LWN.net

Emacs arbitrary code execution flaw

Sean Whitton has announced that the original fix for an arbitrary code execution flaw in Emacs (CVE-2024-53920) was incomplete. Bas Alberts discovered that viewing or editing untrusted files in modes other than Emacs's Lisp mode can also result in arbitrary code execution. This problem affects all Emacs versions affected by CVE-2024-53920. This means Emacs 24 and newer, and possibly also older versions. A minimal fix, attached, is queued up for release with Emacs 31.2. We (the Emacs upstream maintainers) don't expect to backport the fix to older Emacs releases ourselves. LWN covered the original vulnerability in December 2024.

LWN.net

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, apr-util, coreutils, freerdp, git-lfs, glib2, gstreamer1-plugins-base, kernel, libkcapi, nginx, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, osbuild-composer, perl-YAML-Syck, postgresql16-postgis, ruby, ruby4.0, ruby:3.3, and vim), Debian (jbig2dec, kamailio, nginx, spip, and xorg-server), Fedora (baresip, bind, bluez, bubblewrap, chirp, chromium, cockpit, composer, corosync, darktable, dokuwiki, elixir, exiv2, expat, firefox, freerdp, freerdp2, gdk-pixbuf2, gegl04, golang-x-perf, grpcurl, kernel, kernel-headers, libevent, libmongocrypt, libpcap, libre, libsoup3, memcached, mingw-expat, mingw-openexr, mongo-c-driver, mrtg, nagios-plugins, nsd, nss, openssl, openvpn, PackageKit, pdns-recursor, perl-Net-OAuth, perl-XML-Bare, php-pecl-mongodb2, python-asteval, python-pip, rclone, rest, rust-hickory-net, rust-hickory-proto, rust-hickory-resolver, rust-ppmd-rust, rust-webbrowser, srt, syncthing, tar, tkimg, and valkey), Gentoo (Chromium, Google Chrome,