Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
CuerdOS 2.0 Skycatcherโs Xfce edition leans on Debian Trixie, custom tuning, and some unconventional app choices like Vivaldi and Harmony Music. The post CuerdOS 2.0 Skycatcher Xfce: Spanish Distro Takes Chances, Mostly Succeeds appeared first on FOSS Force.
The Fedora Project has announced the results of the Fedora 43 election cycle. Five seats were open on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners are Kevin Fenzi, Zbigniew Jฤdrzejewski-Szmek, Timothรฉe Ravier, Dave Cantrell, and Mรกirรญn Duffy.
Prepare to be surprised by the unusual cron jobs that work wonders.
by George Whittaker Introduction A fresh entry has just appeared in the world of Linux distributions: Loss32, a lightweight operating system built from scratch with one goal in mind โ giving old and low-resource computers a new lease on life. Announced by its small but passionate development team, Loss32 aims to be fast, respectful of older hardware, and friendly to users who want simplicity without sacrificing modern usability. Whether youโre rediscovering an old laptop in a drawer or building a tiny home server, Loss32 promises to deliver a capable computing experience with minimal overhead. A Distribution Born from a Simple Idea Loss32 began as a personal project by a group of open-source enthusiasts frustrated with how quickly modern software has moved past older machines. They noticed that even relatively recent hardware can struggle with mainstream operating systems, leaving many devices underutilized. Their solution: build a distro that boots fast, uses minimal RAM and disk spac
Seafile 13.0 updates its file sync server with AI search, structured metadata, real-time collaboration, and full-text indexing.
Gentoo Linux has published a 2025 project retrospective that looks at how the community has evolved, changes to the distribution, infrastructure, and finances for the Gentoo Foundation. Gentoo currently consists of 31663 ebuilds for 19174 different packages. For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of binary packages available on the mirrors. Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for different processor architectures and system configurations, with an overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date. The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025, with a slight decrease from 123942 to 112927. The number of commits by external contributors was 9396, now across 377 unique external authors.
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) is suing VIZIO over smart TVs that include software licensed under the GPL and LGPL (including the Linux kernel, FFmpeg, systemd, and others). VIZIO didn't provide the source code along with the device, and on request they only provided some of it. Unlike a typical lawsuit about enforcing the GPL, the SFC isn't suing as a copyright holder; it's suing as a normal owner of the TV in question. This approach opens some important legal questions, and after years of pre-trial maneuvering (most recently resulting in a ruling related to signing keys that is the subject of a separate article), we might finally obtain some answers when the case goes to trial on January 12. As things stand, it seems likely that the judge in the case will rule that that the GPL-enforcement lawsuits can be a matter of contract law, not just copyright law, which would be a major change to how GPL enforcement works.
On December 24 2025, Linus Torvalds posted a strongly worded message celebrating a ruling in the ongoing GPL-compliance lawsuit filed against VIZIO by the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). This case and Torvalds's response have put a spotlight on an old debate over the extent to which the source-code requirements of the GNU General Public License (version 2) extend to keys and other data needed to successfully install modified software on a device. It is worth looking at whether this requirement exists, the subtleties in interpretation that cloud the issue, and the extent to which, if any, the SFC is demanding that information.
The European Commission has opened a public consultation on a new Open Digital Ecosystems strategy focused on open source, security, and EU tech sovereignty.
The RADV ray-tracing improvement covered earlier this week for some big performance gains for Unreal Engine 5 titles running under Linux thanks to Steam Play has been merged for Mesa 25.0...
Who needs another productivity app when your desktop can be the productivity app?
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.18.4 and 6.12.64 stable kernels. As always, each contains important fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.
Sorry Ubuntu! I can't help it.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gcc-toolset-14-binutils, gcc-toolset-15-binutils, httpd, kernel, libpng, mariadb, mingw-libpng, poppler, python3.12, and ruby:3.3), Debian (foomuuri and libsodium), Fedora (python-pdfminer and wget2), Oracle (audiofile, bind, gcc-toolset-15-binutils, libpng, mariadb, mariadb10.11, mariadb:10.11, mariadb:10.5, mingw-libpng, poppler, and python3.12), Red Hat (git-lfs, kernel, libpng, libpq, mariadb:10.3, osbuild-composer, postgresql, postgresql:13, and postgresql:15), Slackware (curl), SUSE (c-ares-devel, capstone, curl, gpsd, ImageMagick, libpcap, log4j, python311-filelock, and python314), and Ubuntu (libcaca, libxslt, and net-snmp).
The Orange Pi RV2 is a Single Board Computer (SBC) that differs from the SBCs that have an ARM processor. This board uses a RISC-V (pronounced 'Risk-Five') processor, but we can get into that soon. Before I get into the differences between RISC-V and ARM, we need to look at the specs of the SBC itself. Orange Pi RV2 Specifications The specs are for the RV2 board and consist of the following specifications: Ky X1 8-core 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GCVB) @ 1.6 GHz GPU... https://www.linux.org/threads/orange-pi-rv2-setting-up-a-risc-v-media-server-with-ubuntu.58545/
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