news
GNU/Linux Leftovers
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Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization
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Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: Zswap
Zswap vs Zram
Last year I blogged about using Zram for VMs [1]. That setup is still working well for VMs and for phones and laptops with no swap device.
I have just read Chris Down’s insightful blog post about Zswap vs Zram [2] which convinced me to setup Zswap on some systems. I have had some of the problems that were described in his blog post when trying to run Zram on workstation and server systems.
One limitation of zswap is that it doesn’t allow specifying the compression level. For zram I can put the following in /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf to set the zstd compression level (this works well on my Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen6): [...]
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Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Notebook Check ☛ Privacy-focused, AI-infused Gnoppix Linux 26.6 now available
Heavily focused on stabilizing the underlying build system, Gnoppix Linux 26.6 drops with a cleaner desktop user experience, highly requested live boot capabilities, and improved security. Other changes include improved multi-language support in GRUB, multiple under-the-hood tweaks and fixes, and more.
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New Releases
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Barry Kauler ☛ EasyOS Excalibur-series version 7.3.7
There was a 7.3.6 release, but it has a serious fault so got withdrawn and not announced on this blog. So, the previous release is 7.3.4, announced here: [...]
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Dominique Leuenberger ☛ Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2026/22
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
Week 22 seemed a bit less hectic than the previous one. AppArmor profiles are still being fixed left and right. We’re really sorry for all the trouble AppArmor 5.0 brought you. The number of reports on that topic is decreasing, which means the AppArmor maintainer has done a great job addressing the issues as they were reported. Let’s all give our appreciation to Christian for his dedication to the topic.
The release team managed to publish 5 snapshots (0521, 0523, 0524, 0525, and 0527) during this week, delivering the following changes: [...]
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Fedora Family / IBM
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LinuxStans ☛ AI Found 3,900 Critical Open Source Bugs. I.C.B.M. Is Paying $5 Billion to Fix Them [Ed: False on all counts, just false marketing claims from two parties]
There is a number buried in IBM’s Project Lightwell announcement that deserves more attention than it is getting right now. Anthropic’s Mythos Preview Hey Hi (AI) model scanned open source software and identified nearly 3,900 high or critical-severity vulnerabilities. That is not the result of years of slow auditing.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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OMG Ubuntu ☛ Canonical takes over Flutter desktop maintenance
Google confirmed at Surveillance Giant Google I/O 2026 that Canonical is the new lead maintainer and ‘strategic steward’ of Flutter desktop for Windows, macOS and Linux. The announcement of an expanded partnership with Canonical came during the ‘What’s new in Flutter’ presentation at Surveillance Giant Google I/O 2026, where Kate Lovett, Engineer Manager on the Flutter Framework team at Google, touched on their existing work: “[The Flutter] desktop experience has reached a new level of maturity this year, driven by our incredible engineering partnership with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu”.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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CNX Software ☛ PCMFlow722 library enables two-way real-time HD voice over ESP-NOW with G.722 audio codec
Tanaka Masayuki’s PCMFlow722 library enables (half-duplex) two-way real-time HD voice over ESP-NOW on ESP32 boards with a speaker and a microphone, effectively transforming them into walkie-talkies. The library implements a G.722 wideband codec add-on for PCMFlow lightweight audio decode and PCM flow library for Arduino, which already supports uncompressed PCM, MP3, and FLAC audio codecs. PCM and FLAC take too much bandwidth over ESP-NOW, and MP3 is not suitable for real-time audio, so the legacy G.722 audio codec was selected instead.
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