GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 09, 2025

• Desktop/Laptop

  • The Verge ☛ Apple helped kill netbooks. Will it bring them back?

    That chip could be some version of the A19 found in the current iPhone lineup, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed earlier this year that the company was working on a laptop powered by last year’s A18.

    If the idea of a small, low-cost laptop running on an ultralow-power chip feels familiar, well, it should — we used to call them netbooks. Netbooks erupted on the scene at a weird time in the late aughts, when we were transitioning to a web-first computing world.

• Kernel Space

  • [Old] Stefan Hajnoczi ☛ Stefan Hajnoczi: Profiling tools I use for QEMU storage performance optimization

    Performance analysis is hard when the system is slow but there is no clear bottleneck. If a CPU profile shows that a function is consuming significant amounts of time, then that's a good target for optimizations. On the other hand, if the profile is uniform and each function only consumes a small fraction of time, then it is difficult to gain much by optimizing just one function (although taking function call nesting into account may point towards parent functions that can be optimized): [...]

• Applications/FUD

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Linux PPA Ransomware Scare is Light on Evidence

    Hysteria is contagious online. One person’s worry becomes another’s conviction, and that belief hardens — the thrill of righteous outrage is addictive! This week saw claims a PPA is being used to distribute GNU/Linux ransomware go wild online — but is it true? The story is a bit long, and a bit dry but it goes like this: A user said they tried to install WinBoat (a tool for running backdoored Windows apps on Linux) but it wouldn’t connect to FreeRDP. So they tried FreeRDP from different sources, to no avail.

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

  • Juan J Martínez ☛ alttab is fantastic

    Although I find i3wm very comfortable, very often my muscle memory triggered the ALT + TAB combination after a day of work on the other operating system, and I was kind of resigned to this, until I researched the topic again and I found alttab (also packaged by Debian). And I love it!

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Run Custom Actions Automatically When Switch to Light or Dark

      Want to do some actions automatically when you switch desktop theme to light or dark style? Here’s a new application can do the job for GNOME Desktop. It’s switchcraft, a free open-source Vala written application that provides a modern simple interface, allowing to add custom commands to run automatically when the theme changes.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Slackware Family

    • Building Chromium for Slackware

      I thought it would be helpful, and in any case insightful, to describe how I build the Chromium (also -ungoogled) packages for Slackware. It is not a trivial task but a necessary one I believe.

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • ARC ☛ Penguin Solutions Adds Oracle Linux OS Support to Stratus ztC Endurance Fault-Tolerant Platforms

      Penguin Solutions®, Inc. announced the general availability of the Oracle® Linux operating system on its Stratus ztC Endurance® fault-tolerant computing platforms. The addition of Oracle Linux support enables organizations to run Oracle Database applications, including Oracle e-Business and others, with up to seven nines (99.99999 percent) reliability on a single platform, which equates to 3.15 seconds or less per year of unplanned downtime or data loss.

  • Debian Family

    • Thorsten Alteholz ☛ Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in October 2025

      Debian LTS

      This was my hundred-thirty-sixth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

      • [DLA 4316-1] open-vm-tools security update to fix one CVE related to a local privilege escalation.
      • [DLA 4329-1] libfcgi security update to fix one CVE related to a heap-based buffer overflow via crafted nameLen or valueLen values in data to the IPC socket.
      • [DLA 4337-1] svgpp security update to fix one CVE related to a nullpointer reference.
      • [DLA 4336-1] sysstat security update to fix two CVEs related to a size_t overflow and a multiplication integer overflow.
      • [DLA 4343-1] raptor2 security update to fix two CVEs related to a heap-based buffer over-read and an integer underflow.
      • [DLA 4349-1] request-tracker4 security update to fix one CVE related to CSV injection via ticket values with special characters. The patch was prepared by Andrew Ruthven
      • [DLA 4353-1] xorg-server security update to fix three CVES related to privilege escalation.

      I also attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting.