news
GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers
-
Server
-
AlmaLinux to Highlight its Community-Driven Linux OS at FOSSY 2026
The AlmaLinux OS Foundation, the nonprofit that stewards the free, community-governed open source enterprise Linux distribution, today announced it’s set to exhibit at FOSSY 2026, the Free and Open Source Software yearly conference, taking place August 6-9 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
-
-
Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)
-
OMG Ubuntu ☛ Papirus icon set gets first update in over a year with 80+ new icons
Fans of the the Papirus icon theme will be pleased to hear there a new update – the first since May 2025. Papirus’s first update in 2026 (the tardiness of which its maintainer, Serhii Yeremenko, apologises) brings over 80 new or updated icons spanning apps, games and user-interface icons, plus new file mimetypes and revised symlinks. Frequent updates are why Papirus icons are popular with GNU/Linux users, and have been for such a long time.
-
-
Distributions and Operating Systems
-
Hackaday ☛ At Last! CP/M For Protected Mode
If you used a serious computer pre-IBM PC, there was a fair chance its operating system was CP/M. CP/M was a staple among 8080 and Z80 computers and while there were other versions, we’ll always associate CP/M with the Z-80. There was a CP/M made for the PC which used an 8088 (a hybrid 8-bit bus with a 16-bit 8086 core), but it was overwhelmed by MSDOS. However, there was another interesting version made for the 68000, and now [johnsonjh] has ported that over to create an early version of CP/M for 80386 protected mode.
-
Andrew Nesbitt ☛ brew install actions/checkout
In December I went through why uses: is a package manager with no lockfile, no integrity hashes and no transitive visibility, and in April through the run of incidents that followed from that. GitHub’s 2026 security roadmap has since committed to a lockfile, now in preview as gh-actions-lock, and made immutable actions the preferred resolution path. Neither of those changes adds any review between an action author tagging a release and the runner executing it. Homebrew has run that kind of curated index for fifteen years and, as of the immutable-actions rollout, stores its artifacts as OCI manifests on ghcr.io alongside the actions themselves, so I spent some time working out how much of a GitHub Actions registry you could assemble from Homebrew parts.
-
BSD
-
DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ VIDAR at NYCBUG, tomorrow
Tomorrow’s presentation at NYCBUG is VIDAR, a FreeBSD-based automatic firewall program. Read the event description for details. Go, if you are near. The announcement doesn’t mention streaming so you may need to be in-person.
-
Undeadly ☛ Call for testing: OpenBSD vmm(4)/vmd(8) fd-ification
Thanks to the tireless work of among others Dave Voutila (dv@), development of the OpenBSD/amd64 virtualization system vmm(4)/vmd(8) continues to make progress.
Now breaking changes, but with with potential benefits in both process isolation and compartmentalization of functionality, are on the way. It almost goes without saying that this code needs testing.
-
-