GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 09, 2025

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Podcast Episode 332: 5 Axes Are Better Than 3, Hacking Your Behavior, And The Man Who Made Models

    Elliot and Dan got together this week for a review of the week’s hacking literature, and there was plenty to discuss. We addressed several burning questions, such as why digital microscopes are so terrible, why computer systems seem to have so much trouble with names, and if a thermal receipt printer can cure ADHD.

• Kernel Space

  • WCCF Tech ☛ Intel Is Reportedly Preparing Arc B380; Adds New Battlemage PCI ID to Linux Kernel

    Intel's new offering in the Battlemage lineup is supposedly a budget GPU, which should be succeeding the Arc A380.

    The whereabouts of the Arc B770 might be unknown at the moment, but it appears that Intel may not just be working on a faster mainstream consumer Arc Battlemage GPU but also on an entry-level card. What we are seeing is Intel preparing a new GPU, as was spotted recently in the Linux Kernel driver patches with the PCI ID 0xE209.

• Graphics Stack

  • Frame gen tool for Linux gets up to 4x performance boost with new feature, “mainly” on AMD graphics cards

    In early July, a frame generation on Linux was made available to everyone thanks to a fan-made port of Lossless Scaling, the widely popular upscaling and frame gen tool. It’s just the FG aspect of LS that came to Linux thanks to modder PancakeTAS, but it has proven to be a success. A new update to the app (called lsfg-vk) has arrived with FP16 acceleration for a performance boost.

    There was a little bit of controversy surrounding the launch and its implementation on the Steam Deck via a Decky plugin, but that was soon cleared up. FP16 acceleration arrives after a recent pull request on GitHub and drops the DXVK dependency due to not being compatible – a workaround was found instead.

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

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Harald Sitter ☛ Filelight Speed on Windows

      As of a couple days ago Filelight on backdoored Windows is performing its search many times faster than before. Go check it out!

      https://apps.kde.org/filelight/

      It’s shocking that it was slow to begin with… A few years ago I rewrote the Filelight file walking logic to use native API for GNU/Linux and Windows. I thought I did a pretty good job of it and speed wasn’t too shabby.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Another hang at bootup fixed

    This has been so fustrating. We had Xorg crashing after the desktop was running:

    "Found cause crash Compaq Presario"
    https://bkhome.org/news/202507/found-cause-crash-compaq-presario.html

    ...that I fixed by compiling libpciaccess with the patch.
    

    Fixed, but what has been really frustrating is hanging sooner, before Xorg runs. It turned out that the 'pidof' utility was hanging: [...]

  • BSD

    • Undeadly ☛ Call for testing: USB webcams

      A new opportunity for you to help improve the upcoming OpenBSD 7.8 release has turned up. If YOU have a USB webcam you are using or would like to use with our favorite operating system, Kirill Korinsky (kirill@) would like to hear from you after testing recent snapshots.

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Dominique Leuenberger ☛ Tumbleweed – Review of the weeks 2025/31 & 32

      Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

      Because August 1st is Switzerland’s national holiday, I took the day off last Friday — which is my excuse for skipping last week’s review. The most noteworthy technical change was mostly invisible: we switched FTP tree generation from product-builder to product-composer. This is essentially a rewrite, trimming years of accumulated features back to a more manageable set. One side effect is that product descriptions are now in YAML instead of XML — easier on the eyes.

      The published FTP tree looks largely unchanged, aside from a brief bug where appstream metadata wasn’t registered, causing software centers like Discover and GNOME Software to miss it (now fixed). The main visible change affects ARM users: we merged the FTP trees for armv6, armv7, and aarch64 into a single tree under the ports/aarch64 namespace. This saves several gigabytes on our mirrors by sharing large noarch packages.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ ROS Noetic is EOL – take action to maintain fleet security

      Canonical has added Noetic to its ROS ESM service, which delivers ongoing security updates and critical fixes for ROS packages. This allows developers to confidently continue using EOL ROS distributions, such as Kinetic, Melodic, Foxy, and now Noetic, well beyond their upstream support periods. With ROS ESM, they’ll receive backported CVE patches, bug fixes, and essential updates aligned with Canonical’s long-term maintenance standards.