Linux NewsThe live Linux distro for editing disks just got a big update
GParted Live 1.8.0 is ready to fix your ballooning partition problems.
Mourning Didier Spaier
We have received the sad news that Didier Spaier, maintainer of the blind-friendly Slackware-based Slint distribution, has recently passed away. Philippe Delavalade, who posted the announcement to the Slint mailing list, said: Early 2015, I asked on the slackware list if brltty could be added in the installer; Didier answered promptly that he could do it on slint. Afterwards, he worked hard so that slint became as accessible as possible for visually impaired people. You all know that all these years, he tried and succeeded to answer as quickly as possible to our issues and questions. He will be irreplaceable.
What is this Clawdbot, Err Moltbot, Everyone's Screaming About?
This open source project has survived Anthropic's trademark lawyers, crypto scammers hijacking its identity, and security holes exposing users.
VirtualBox 7.2.6 Released with Initial Support for Linux Kernel 6.19
VirtualBox 7.2.6 open-source virtualization software is now available for download with initial support for the Linux 6.19 kernel and many other improvements. Here's what's new!
OSI pauses 2026 board election cycle
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced that it will not be holding the 2026 spring board election. Instead, it will be creating a working group to "review and improve OSI's board member selection process" and provide recommendations by September 2026: The public election process was designed to gather community priorities and improve board member selection, while final appointments remained with the board. Over time, that nuance has become a source of understandable confusion for community members. Many reasonably expected elections to function as elections normally do, and in fact, the board has generally adopted the electorate's recommendations. When a process feels unclear, trust suffers. When trust suffers, engagement becomes harder. This is especially problematic for an organization whose mission depends on legitimacy and credibility. [...] OSI tried its experiment for the right reasons, but a variety of factors resulted in "elections" that are performatively democratic wh
[$] Open source for phones: postmarketOS
Phones running Linux are ubiquitous these days and it has been that way since Android started working toward dominance in the smartphone market. Unfortunately, Android has slowly increased its freedom-unfriendliness and has become something of a privacy nightmare. In a talk entitled "We need an open-source phone OS" at Open Source Summit Japan 2025, Luca Weiss described the smartphone landscape and gave an overview of postmarketOS as an alternative Linux operating system for mobile handsets.
Transmission 4.1.0 Released with Big Updates
Transmission 4.1 adds support for IPv6 and dual-stack UDP trackers, sequential downloading, and improved µTP (Micro Transport Protocol) performance.
VirtualBox 7.2.6 Released With Stability Fixes Across Windows, Linux, and macOS
VirtualBox 7.2.6 improves reliability on Windows 11, AMD systems, and Linux hosts, with fixes across VMM, GUI, and Guest Additions.
An Ambitious Life Manager That Tries to Do It All… and Almost Succeeds
An open‑source journal and life manager that aims to integrate tasks, notes, and local AI without relying on the cloud. The post An Ambitious Life Manager That Tries to Do It All… and Almost Succeeds appeared first on FOSS Force.
Wasmer 7.0 Released For Advancing WebAssembly On The Desktop & Anywhere
Wasmer 7.0 is out today for this WebAssembly "WASM" run-time for enabling lightweight containers that can run "anywhere" from the desktop to cloud and the edge. The security-minded and extensible WASM runtime provided by Wasmer has already proven to be quite robust while with Wasmer 7.0 has become even more featureful...
PC Gamer on the scx_horoscope scheduler
PC Gamer has run an amusing review of the scx_horoscope scheduler for Linux, which uses astrology to optimize scheduling decisions. The scheduler is full of bizarre features, like its ability to perform real planetary calculations based on accurate geocentric planetary positions, lunar phase scheduling (the full moon gives a 1.4x boost to tasking, apparently) and "zodiac-based task classification". That latter feature is easily one of my favourite bits. Specific planetary bodies "rule" over specific system tasks, so the Sun is in charge of critical system processes, the Moon (tied to emotions, of course) rules over interactive tasks, and Jupiter is assigned to memory-heavy applications, among others.
[$] Who should vote in Fedora elections?
Creating fair governance models for open-source projects is not easy; defining criteria for participants to receive membership and voting rights is a particularly thorny problem for projects that have elections for representative bodies. The Fedora Council, the project's top-level governance body, is wrestling with that conundrum now. This was triggered by a Fedora special-interest group (SIG) granting temporary membership to at least one person for the sole purpose of allowing them to vote in the most recent Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) election. That opened a large can of worms about what it means to be a contributor and how contributors can be identified for voting purposes.
GNOME 50 Finally Lands Improved Discrete GPU Detection
The upcoming release of GNOME 50 to be found in the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 will feature improved discrete GPU detection within the GNOME Shell. This effort has been two years coming and finally merged this week...
GParted Live 1.8 Released With Linux Kernel 6.18
Debian-based GParted Live 1.8, a bootable Linux system for disk partitioning, ships with kernel 6.18, upstream GParted 1.8, and system updates from Debian Sid.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-1.8.0-openjdk), Debian (openssl), Fedora (assimp, chromium, curl, freerdp, gimp, and harfbuzz), Mageia (glibc, haproxy, iperf, and python-pyasn1), Red Hat (image-builder, openssl, and osbuild-composer), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (avahi, cups, gio-branding-upstream, google-osconfig-agent, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel-firmware, libmatio-devel, libopenjp2-7, nodejs22, php8, python-python-multipart, python311-urllib3_1, qemu, and xen), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, jaraco.context, openssl, and openssl, openssl1.0).