GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 08, 2025

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Hackaday ☛ FLOSS Weekly Episode 832: Give Yourself A Medal

    This week, Jonathan Bennett chats with Alexandre Dulaunoy and Quentin Jérôme about Kunai and CIRCL! How does Kunai help solve Linux security monitoring? Why is eBPF the right place for one of these tools to run? And how is CIRCL helping Luxembourg and the world deal with the modern security landscape? Watch to find out!

• Kernel Space

  • The Register UK ☛ Linux kernel to drop 486 and early 586 support

    The next version of the Linux kernel is progressing towards release. Release candidate 5 appeared over the weekend, and we expect the kernel itself will probably officially arrive around the end of May or early June. What we feel is one of the most interesting changes is the removal of support for several chips from the 32-bit 80486 era.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Aground Zero Review

    Aground Zero is a futuristic 3D base-builder with colony simulator elements in a blocky universe. Developed and published by Fancy Fish Games, the game runs well on GNU/Linux and Steam Deck.

• Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Qt World Summit 2025

      These past two days I attended the Qt World Summit 2025

      
      

      It happened in Munich in the SHOWPALAST MÜNCHEN. The venue is HUGE,  we had around 800 attendees (unofficial sources, don't trust the number too much) and it felt it could hold more. One slightly unfortunate thing is that it was a bit cold (temperatures in Munich these two days were well below the average for May) and quite some parts of the venue are outdoors, but you can't control the weather, so not much to "fix" here.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Osservatorio Nessuno ☛ Patela: A basement full of amnesic servers

    Patela is a minimal software tool that downloads and uploads configuration files to a server. The server communicates network configurations (primarily assigning available IPs and the gateway via an API), and the client reads and applies them. All other files that would normally need to persist between reboots are encrypted locally using the TPM and then uploaded in encrypted form to the configuration server. This way, the configuration server never has access to the machine’s keys and cannot directly compromise it—except possibly through Denial of Service, such as distributing invalid IPs or corrupted backups.

  • A Little Bit Now, A Lotta Bit Later

    Quick Settings has a new “Prevent Sleep” toggle

    Leo added a new “Prevent Sleep” toggle. This is useful when you’re giving a presentation or have a long-running background task where you want to temporarily avoid letting the computer go to sleep on its normal schedule. We also fixed a bug where the “Dark Mode” toggle would cancel the dark mode schedule when used. We now have proper schedule snoozing, so when you manually toggle Dark Mode on or off while using a timed or sunset-to-sunrise schedule, your schedule will resume on the next schedule change instead of being canceled completely. Vishal also fixed an issue that caused some apps to report being improperly closed on system shutdown or restart and on the lock screen we now show the “Suspend” button rather than the “Lock” button.

    System Settings

    Locale settings has a fresh layout thanks to Alain with its options aligned more cleanly and improved links to additional settings.

  • Debian Family

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Y2232 bug?