GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 12, 2025

• BSD

  • Klara ☛ ZFS Tuning: How to Optimize Performance for Your Workload

    ZFS tuning is essential for optimizing performance based on your workload. This guide explores how to fine-tune key settings—like record size, caching strategies, and hardware choices—to maximize throughput, improve IOPS, and reduce latency in your ZFS storage environment.

• Graphics Stack

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.14 Fixed 575 Driver Support (Ubuntu PPA)

    For NVIDIA users who want to enable hardware acceleration for Firefox video playback, NVIDIA VA-API driver released v0.0.14 few days ago with improved compatibility and various fixes. As you may know, Firefox in GNU/Linux does NOT support NVDEC (NVIDIA Video Decoder) to accelerate video decoding.

• Applications

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Warehouse 2.1.0 Added Context Menu Option to Open Local Flatpak Files

    Warehouse, the popular Flatpak app management software, released new 2.1.0 version today! Warehouse is a free open-source application that provides a simple user interface to manage all installed Flatpak apps. With it, you may view app info, change app version (upgrade/downgrade), manage user data and left overs.

• Games

  • Robert Heaton ☛ diceomatic: a DSL for making children's dice games

    As the games kept coming, I ran out of interesting ways to generate sums with 6-sided dice. I bought some 20-siders, and these big boys kept things interesting for another week or two. But I started to chafe against the limits of any kind of simple polyhedra. I started to get ambitious.

  • Hackaday ☛ Randomly Generating Atari Games

    They say that if you let a million monkeys type on a million typewriters, they will eventually write the works of Shakespeare. While not quite the same thing [bbenchoff] (why does that sound familiar?), spent some computing cycles to generate random data and, via heuristics, find valid Atari 2600 “games” in the data.

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

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Application snaps 25.04.2 released!

      Now available in the snap store!

      Along with that, I have fixed some outstanding bugs:

      Ark: now can open/save files in removable media

      Kasts: Once again has sound

      WIP: Updating Qt6 to 6.9 and frameworks to 6.14

      Enjoy everyone!

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Debian Family

    • Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Updated Austin, DebConf 25 preparations continue and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

      Debian Contributions: 2025-05

      is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

      Updated Austin, by Colin Watson and Helmut Grohne

      Austin is a frame stack sampling profiler for Python. It allows profiling Python applications without instrumenting them while losing some accuracy in the process, and is the only one of its kind presently packaged for Debian. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been uploaded in a while and hence the last Python version it worked with was 3.8. We updated it to a current version and also dealt with a number of architecture-specific problems (such as unintended sign promotion, 64bit time_t fallout and strictness due to -Wformat-security ) in cooperation with upstream. With luck, it will migrate in time for trixie.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • LWN ☛ Covert web-to-app tracking via localhost on Android

      The "Local Mess" Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub

      repository is dedicated to the disclosure of an Android tracking

      exploit used by (at least) Meta and Yandex.

• Security

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Wednesday

    Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (glibc, grafana, kernel-rt, libjpeg-turbo, libxslt, and thunderbird), Debian (curl), Fedora (dtk6core, dtk6gui, dtk6log, dtk6widget, fcitx5-qt, gammaray, kddockwidgets, kwin, LabPlot, libqtxdg, nheko, plasma-integration, python-pyqt6, python-pyside6, qt-creator, roundcubemail, zeal, and a large number of qt6 packages), Oracle (firefox, glibc, grafana, kernel, libxslt, perl-FCGI, python3.12-cryptography, thunderbird, and zlib), SUSE (glib2, libjxl, libsoup2, nbdkit, nodejs22, perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA, perl-YAML-LibYAML, python3, tomcat, and transfig), and Ubuntu (dotnet8, dotnet9 and samba).

  • APNIC ☛ [Podcast] Evolving GCA’s honeynet project

    Leslie Daigle discusses AIDE and GCA’s work to analyse malicious traffic collected via honeynets.