Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
Last month the Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation to standardize Internet-native payments for AI agents as their latest AI play. That followed other "AI" initiatives from dealing with AI exploits to AI asset and data exchange. Today they have another AI foray being announced with the creation of the Tokenomics Foundation...
While Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman does use AI / LLMs himself to success in the Linux kernel, given the "onslaught" of kernel patches produced by large language models and the intent on the Linux kernel's staging area being an area for newcomers to get involved, moving forward he's now rejecting AI/LLM-generated staging patches. But there is one exception and that is for genuinely valid security fixes...
Wild 0.10 released overnight as this very fast linker for Linux that is written in the Rust programming language and focused on iterative development...
For those with a MSI Claw A8 BZ2EM handheld gaming system, the model powered by the latest AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme SoC, an important addition is coming to the Linux 7.3 kernel so that the M-Center keys will be properly supported...
FFmpeg 9.0 open-source multimedia framework is now available for download with LCEVC track muxing support in the MP4 muxer, a v360_vulkan filter, and more.
FFmpeg 9.0 arrives with animated WebP support, Vulkan acceleration for APV, ProRes RAW VideoToolbox decoding, and new GPU-powered filters.
Dropbeat is a new riff on a old tune, a panel-based music applet for GNOME Shell that gives you an alternate way to pause, play and skip tracks in MPRIS-friendly Linux media players. Applets of this ilk are legion, and this panel applet doesn’t do anything that different to ones you may have tried in the past or currently use (for all the bells and whistles, try the Dynamic Music Pill extension instead). But it does do some things differently. When installed, it adds a button to your panel that when clicked “shows a cool card to control your media […]
Ubuntu is transitioning another of its core system Deb packages to the sandboxed snap format, a move it says will improve security and allow for better desktop integration. The package in question is hwctrl, a small command-line tool preinstalled on Ubuntu desktop and server as part of Canonical’s rust-hwlib hardware API set. Canonical engineer Sergio Costas explained in a package change that due to “planned architecture changes for integration of hwctl with gnome-control-center and other front-ends, and for increased security, the HWCTL package will be snap-only from now onward”. If you’re on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, you will be automatically moved […]
John MacFarlane has published a lengthy retrospective to commemorate twenty years of the Pandoc document converter. On August 3, 2006, I uploaded the first version of pandoc to my website, releasing it under the free GPL license. Pandoc 0.1 consisted of about 3000 lines of Haskell code, with no dependencies aside from GHC's standard library. It could convert Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX documents into any of these formats, plus RTF or S5. I had no idea at the time that this would just be the first of over two hundred releases over the next twenty years; that the project would become the most popular program written in Haskell; that I would spend countless hours on bug-fixes, improvement, and project management; that I would collaborate with programmers in many other countries; that pandoc would come to support over fifty document formats; that it would allow automatic generation of citations and bibliographies; that it would become integrated into academic writing tools
FFmpeg 9.0 is now available as the latest feature release for this widely used, open-source multimedia library...
In addition to the AMDGPU feature pull request to DRM-Next last week that landed DRM format modifiers for old AMD GPUs and a variety of other improvements, a secondary set of AMDGPU feature work followed that last week in preparation for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window...
Rhythmbox 3.5 music player debuts with a new default playback backend, improved lyrics support, podcast upgrades, and a gPodder.net plugin.
Rhythmbox 3.5 open-source media player is now available for download with improvements to lyrics search, podcast support, and the new playback backend. Here's what's new!
The same low-quality AI patterns kept showing up in submissions even after GNOME updated its review guidelines in December.
For those of us with a long memory: John Goerzen has announced the release of C-Kermit 11, the first release of this file-transfer utility in 15 years. As Debian maintainer of Kermit, I noticed some areas where it wasn't matching modern expectations. One area was, not surprising for a project of its age, security. Another area was that its character set or line-ending conversions are usually not desired now; we are used to byte-identical binary transfers, and the defaults caused confusion and even some rare instances of data corruption. So I started making a few patches last year. See the changelog for details on the work that has been done. Most of us probably haven't thought about C-Kermit in years (if ever), but there was a time when it was an essential tool for moving files between machines.
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