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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
668 stories archived
AppManager installs AppImages on Ubuntu without needing FUSE
AppImages are designed to be simple. Download one, make it executable and run it. On Ubuntu, though, there’s an extra step: Ubuntu ships FUSE 3 by default, but some AppImages still need FUSE 2 (libfuse2t64) to run. AppManager is a new(ish) GTK4/Libadwaita app which fixes that particular annoyance by mounting AppImages through uruntime instead of FUSE. It handles the usual SquashFS-packed AppImages, plus the newer DwarFS-packed ones too. Double-click an .AppImage file and AppManager opens a macOS-style install flow. Drag the app icon to the folder and AppManager moves the file to ~/Applications, or a directory you choose, and creates the app launcher and shortcut […] You're reading AppManager installs AppImages on Ubuntu without needing FUSE , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
COSMIC Epoch 1.3 Released With New Frosted Glass Option
For those that were intrigued by the COSMIC desktop's "Frosted Glass" effect, it's now available in released form with today's COSMIC Epoch 1.3 release...
FreeBSD 16 Retires The Last Of Its GPL Code From Its Base System
As of this past week in the FreeBSD source tree for FreeBSD 16, the last of the GNU GPL licensed code from the base system has been retired...
BOSGAME VTA-439: A Great, Linux-Friendly Mini PC Powered By AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470
For those that were intrigued by the recent launch of the AMD Ryzen AI Halo developer platform with a very capable mini PC but looking for something more affordable and not needing quite as much horsepower or AI focus, BOSGAME recently launched their VTA-439 mini PC. The BOSGAME VTA-439 is powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 with Radeon 890M graphics for those wanting still quite a capable mini PC that retails for around $1,049 USD while sporting 32GB of RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD storage.
The Linux.org story
Rob Kennedy has posted the story of the birth of Linux.org — one of the earliest Linux-related web sites — and its more recent rebirth. The site was founded in May 1994 by Michael McLagan, at a time when Linux itself was barely three years old. Linus Torvalds had only just released it to the world, there was no real way for a newcomer to find their footing, no search engines, no Wikipedia, none of the infrastructure people take for granted now for figuring out a new piece of technology. Michael built linux.org to fill that gap, a place for people to learn about Linux and follow the movement as it grew.
Blender 5.2 LTS Released With Many Great Enhancements
Blender 5.2 is out today as the newest Long Term Support release for this leading, open-source 3D modeling software...
System76 Launches New Adder Pro Laptop With NVIDIA GPU, 2K OLED & Up To 96GB RAM
System76 today announced their new Adder Pro laptop that they are promoting as the "gamer's dream machine" with its NVIDIA graphics, 2K OLED 500 nit display, up to 96GB RAM, and 3.37 lb weight...
GNOME Wants to Let You Test Experimental Features Without Breaking Anything
Here's how GNOME plans to make testing safer and more accessible for everyone.
Call for topics for the 2026 Maintainers Summit
The Maintainers Summit is an annual, invitation-only gathering of kernel developers and maintainers to discuss development-process issues; see LWN's 2025 Maintainers Summit coverage for an example. The call for topics for the 2026 gathering (Prague, October 8) has gone out. One of the best ways to obtain an invitation to the Summit is with a good topic proposal. For best consideration, topics should be submitted before July 24.
Linux Foundation's Latest Foray Is To Standardize Internet-Native Payments For AI Agents
There is yet-another-foundation being stewarded by the Linux Foundation that further broadens its scope outside of the typical Linux/open-source umbrella. Today the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the x402 Foundation for aiming to standardize Internet-native payments for AI agents and applications...
[$] Sending packets directly from BPF
Tetragon , the BPF-based security monitoring tool, uses BPF to monitor different aspects of a running kernel and enforce user-specified policies. It sends its data to a user-space process, which forwards the data to a central monitoring service elsewhere in the network, however. This presents a point of vulnerability: if an attacker can kill Tetragon's user-space agent, it won't be able to properly report on the situation. Song Liu, Mahé Tardy, and Liam Wiseheart spoke about their work removing the need for the user-space agent at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit .
Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Proposed For GlandaGPU: An Open-Source Soft GPU Core
A new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver has been sent out for GlandaGPU, an open-source custom 3D graphics core designed in VHDL and running on FPGA hardware...
Intel IGC 2.38.2 Brings Latest Round Of Graphics Compiler Improvements
Ahead of the next Intel Compute Runtime release, IGC 2.38.2 was released today as the newest feature update to this open-source graphics compiler used by Intel iGPU/dGPU hardware on both Windows and Linux...
Intel Vulkan Driver Now Supports H.265 10-bit Video Encoding
Hyunjun Ko with Igalia continues advancing the Vulkan Video capabilities of the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems...
Linux Dealing With Apple's Wild Mess Of Sensors On Apple Silicon SoCs
While there has been the Apple System Management Controller "SMC" hardware monitoring driver with the intent on exposing battery/power stats as well as thermal and more for Apple Silicon SoCs on Linux, it hasn't yet been working out properly on the mainline kernel. Between missing Device Tree nodes to the hodgepodge mess of sensors between the different Apple M-Series SoCs, it's a mess...
Haiku Merges NVMM For Initial Virtualization Support, But It Doesn't Yet Fully Work
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has published their June 2026 status report. In the past month the developers merged their NVMM VM monitor support, hardware driver improvements, and progressed toward the upcoming Haiku sixth beta release...
"Light" GRUB Alternative Package For Confidential Computing Approved For Fedora 45
A month ago there was a change proposal raised for offering a "light" version of the GRUB2 bootloader for use in confidential computing environments. While there were some differing views on the matter for this alternative, stripped-down GRUB package as opposed to just using other bootloaders like systemd-boot, ultimately, the proposal is now approved...
Weston 16.0 Compositor Released With HDR Improvements, Vulkan Fixes
Overnight the Weston 16.0 release occurred as the latest milestone for this reference Wayland compositor...
New Linux Patches Aim To Better Handle Multiple Swap Devices
For those having Linux systems with multiple swap devices, such as for swap tiering or layered swap handling, a set of patches posted today for the Linux kernel are looking to improve the situation...
Graviton5 Outperforming Intel Xeon Granite Rapids But Falls Short Of AMD EPYC Turin
Following the recent GA of the AWS M9g series as the first instances powered by the new Graviton5 CPUs, I recently ran benchmarks looking at Graviton4 vs. Graviton5 CPU performance. There was very nice generational gains for the new AWS Graviton processors with the shift from Arm Neoverse-V2 to Neoverse-V3 cores and from DDR5-5600 to DDR5-8800 memory, among other improvements. For those wondering how the Graviton5 ARM server processors compare to AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon, here are some additional comparison data points from the Amazon EC2 cloud.
Ubuntu 26.04 fixes Papers bug that sent PDF links to wrong page
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is prepping a bug fix update to Papers, the document viewer that replaced Evince in 25.04, resolving several annoyances – including internal PDF links that jumped to the wrong page. The internal link snafu only occurred in some PDFs, not all, and typically took you to a page one off the actual target. Annoying. The fix stops two separate bits of code that both tried to set the zoom level when links jumped to fit-width or fit-page view. A knock-on quirk also saw the alt + p shortcut (which will jump back to the previous page) wouldn’t […] You're reading Ubuntu 26.04 fixes Papers bug that sent PDF links to wrong page , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
[$] Shielding running kernels against exploits with BPF
Cisco has some unusual challenges when it comes to deploying security patches across the company's many devices running custom kernels. John Fastabend spoke about his work preventing exploits with BPF at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit . The technique could substantially reduce the time necessary to respond to kernel vulnerabilities, but it will not be fully effective unless more hooks are added to the kernel.
Final normal Debian bookworm release
Debian has announced the final normal update for Debian 12 ("bookworm"). Long-term-support updates will continue until 2028 . As may be expected from a stable version, the update is mostly limited to security fixes. Still, it may be time for Debian users to look into upgrading to a more recent version. Conveniently, Debian 13 ("trixie") also received an update this weekend, with many of the same security fixes.
Slack Who? This Self-Hosted Chat App Just Went Open Source
Built by one developer over the past year, Chatto is a team chat solution that can be self-hosted.