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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
663 stories archived
Dynamic Music Pill adds word-by-word lyrics highlighting
An updated version of Dynamic Music Pill, the GNOME Shell extension that shows track info and lyrics in your panel or dock with more animated flourishes than your average now-playing applet, is out. If you’re prone to a bit of desk-side crooning, Dynamic Music Pill v1.3.0 adds two new lyrics provider APIs, BetterLyrics and BiniLyrics, with TTML parsing to provide word-by-word karaoke-style highlighting. If one of these new lyrics providers has word-level timing for the track you’re listening to, you get it; if not, it falls back to line-by-line as before (or plain static text if nothing synced is available, […] You're reading Dynamic Music Pill adds word-by-word lyrics highlighting , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
KDE Plasma 6.8 Improvements For UI, Built-In Remote Desktop Server
It's been another busy summertime week of KDE developers working toward a great Plasma 6.8 desktop release in October...
Linux 7.3 To Support Logitech HID++ 2.0 Reprogrammable Button Support
For those with newer, high-end Logitech input devices, coming with Linux 7.3 is support for the re-programmable button support of the HID++ 2.0 protocol...
Initial Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra Support Being Upstreamed For Linux 7.3
Upstreamed for the Linux 7.2 kernel was the Device Tree (DT) support for booting the mainline Linux kernel on the base Apple M3 SoC. Though it's not yet useful for end-users with many features remaining to be supported and upstreamed. Now for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel, the M3 Pro, Max, and Ultra variants will also have initial support for booting on the mainline kernel...
Intel QATlib 26.08 Released With Gen6 Device Support, 2MB Hugepages
Intel today released an updated version of their QuickAssist Technology library (QATlib) as the user-space component for making use of QuickAssist accelerators under Linux...
TTM Memory Management For Graphics To Be More Aggresive With Linux 7.3
This week a final batch of DRM-Misc-Next feature material was submitted for DRM-Next to queue ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening later in the month. Most notable is the TTM memory management code is now being more agressive when allocating below protection limits. This is an improvement coming thanks to Valve's open-source Linux graphics team...
[$] Changes in shadow-utils password-expiration features
The shadow-utils project provides the tools that handle /etc/shadow , /etc/passwd , and other related databases; in general, manages users and groups on many Linux systems. While most software releases are notable for what is added, the recent shadow-utils 4.20.0 release is most noteworthy for what has been removed. Specifically, several utilities and functionality related to periodic password expiry, which were deprecated in the December 2025 4.19.0 release, have been removed as planned. It is still possible to manage some aspects of password aging with shadow-utils, but organizations that depend on such features should start planning for their complete removal within a few years.
Calibre 9.13 fixes broken ebook search in the content server
A new bug-fix release of Calibre, the open-source e-book manger, view and converter, is available for download. Calibre 9.13 fixes a number of PDF-related issues, including a conversion error that could occur on Linux distributions shipping an ‘ancient’ version of the libxml2 library, which is mainly older Debian installs. The cause was a clash between Qt’s GPU detection and Calibre’s PDF parser, which both need different versions of libxml2. Calibre now preloads the version it needs before Qt’s check can interfere, per the commit message. A regression in the Calibre 9.x series was causing internal links in PDF documents to […] You're reading Calibre 9.13 fixes broken ebook search in the content server , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
The Software Stewardship Lab launches
The Software Stewardship Lab , a nonprofit organization based in Scotland, has announced its existence . Our current research focuses are: Software supply chain security — We're working on an observatory that allows users to identify and monitor the world's critical Open Source packages in real time, including previously hidden parts of the dependency graph. Maintainer burnout — Our report on burnout in Open Source has been well-received. We're working on yearly follow-ups, plus a companion report on how AI is affecting maintainer burnout. Moving forward, the Lab's experts will direct funding to and supervise Open Source sustainability researchers doing critical work. We are already working with universities to teach the next generations of software supply chain experts.
Intel Makes Progress On HDMI 2.1 FRL With Their Linux Driver For Meteor Lake & Newer
Following AMD making progress with HDMI Fixed Rate Link (FRL) and other HDMI 2.1 functionality for their open-source Linux kernel graphics driver, Intel is out today with a big set of 44 patches working on HDMI 2.1 FRL support for their kernel graphics driver with Meteor Lake hardware and newer...
LightDM lives: version 1.33.0 released
Version 1.33.0 of the LightDM display manager has been released. This is the first release in four years : the project had been sponsored by Canonical but was effectively unmaintained in recent years. It has been transferred to a new community repository and is now maintained by Joshua Peisach and Neal Gompa. The new release includes Qt6 support, code optimizations, and a list of other fixes that had been in limbo pending a new release.
PoCL 7.2-RC1 Brings Official OpenCL 3.0 Conformance On RISC-V & x86_64 CPUs
The release candidate of PoCL 7.2 is now available for testing of this Portable Computing Language implementation of OpenCL that allows for CPU-based execution or via alternative LLVM back-ends allows for OpenCL on Level Zero, NVIDIA GPUs, and even remote devices/hardware...
Stable kernel releases for Friday with a single bug fix
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.12.102 , 6.6.150 , 6.1.182 , 5.15.215 , 5.10.264 stable kernels. This round of stable kernel releases contains a fix for a single bug, found by Thomas Lamprecht , that affected several of the kernels released yesterday in response to a security vulnerability ( CVE-2026-68480 ) that could allow data leakage through speculative execution. The 6.12.102 release adds the backported security fix for CVE-2026-68480 to the 6.12 series. As always, users are advised to upgrade.
HyperX Driver Coming For Linux 7.3 Just To Report A Microphone's Mute Status
A new driver coming for the Linux 7.3 kernel is HID-HyperX. It's not some new driver to support fancy hardware and some nifty features but rather mundane in nature due to the poor behavior of a high-end HyperX USB gaming microphone...
NetworkManager Adopts Policy For AI Coding Assistants
The latest high profile open-source project to commit to an AI coding policy is NetworkManager, the widely-used software for Linux network configuration...
AMD ROCm Spur: Providing AI-Native, Rust-Based Job Scheduling
The newest ROCm component for AMD's open-source GPU compute stack is Spur as an AI-native, Rust-written job scheduler for scaling up GPU workloads to multi-thousand GPU clusters...
Linux 7.2-rc7 Addresses A "Nasty" Race Condition Leading To Use-After-Free After 8 Years
The Linux kernel Git activity continues being quite heavy this week on fixes. It's looking like the Linux 7.2-rc7 kernel release on Sunday will be another big one with the changes continuing to flow in from both developers and AI bots...
AMD Updates HDMI 2.1 VRR & ALLM Patches But Will Miss Out On Linux 7.3
Complementing the HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support that AMD already upstreamed to the Linux kernel, AMD engineers have been further ironing out their HDMI 2.1 implementation for the open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. The latest quest has been getting HDMI 2.1 variable rate refresh (VRR) support upstreamed along with HDMI Auto Low-Latency Mode (ALLM)...
Vulkan 1.4.359 Expands Cooperative Matrix Capabilities
Vulkan 1.4.359 released today and this one week update to the Vulkan API specification brings a new extension for enhancing the cooperative matrix capabilities...
Illinois Just Told Every Operating System to Start Reporting Your Kid's Age
The Children's Online Social Media Safety Act has device makers collect the age bracket, but apps still have to act on it.
GCC 16.2 Released With More Than 100 Fixes
Following the GCC 16.1 compiler release from the end of April as the first stable version of GCC 16, GCC 16.2 is now available with dozens of bug fixes collected since then for further stabilizing this year's GNU compiler feature release...
Proxmox Virtual Environment Officially Runs on ARM64, But Your Raspberry Pi Isn't Supported Yet
The release is powered by Debian 13.5 and Linux 7.0, with NVIDIA Grace and Vera systems fully supported.
Nobody Touched This Linux Driver for Years, Until AI Started Poking Around and It Got Removed
Moxa confirmed the Intellio hardware was discontinued back in 2021, but the driver only left the kernel recently after AI agents started poking at the dead code.
AMD Squeezes In A Few More Graphics Driver Updates For Linux 7.3
AMD today submitted their last planned feature updates ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening later this month...