LWN.net's Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
Thursday, February 28th, 2013
| Time |
Event |
| 1:41a |
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 28, 2013
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 28, 2013 is available. | | 4:48p |
Security advisories for Thursday
Fedora has updated nss-softokn (F18:
plaintext recovery), nss-util (F18:
plaintext recovery), nspr (F18: plaintext
recovery), nss (F18: plaintext recovery),
and nss-pam-ldapd (F17: code execution).
Mageia has updated nss-pam-ldapd
(code execution), hplip (insecure tmpfile
handling), apache (multiple cross-site
scripting flaws), transmission (code
execution), and flash-player-plugin
(multiple vulnerabilities).
Mandriva has updated php (multiple
vulnerabilities).
openSUSE has updated flash-player (11.4; 12.1: multiple vulnerabilities).
Oracle has updated hplip (OL6:
insecure tmpfile handling), php (OL6:
multiple vulnerabilities), sssd (OL6:
privilege escalation and denial of service), libvirt (OL6: DNS access restriction bypass),
kernel (OL6: multiple vulnerabilities), kdelibs (OL6: two vulnerabilities), and dbus-glib (OL6: privilege escalation).
Red Hat has updated flash-plugin
(multiple vulnerabilities).
Scientific Linux has updated java-1.6.0-sun (SL5: multiple vulnerabilities).
Ubuntu has updated dbus-glib
(privilege escalation) and sudo (privilege
escalation). | | 4:55p |
Stable kernels 3.8.1, 3.4.34, and 3.0.67
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 3.8.1, 3.4.34,
and 3.0.67 stable kernels. 3.8.1 and
3.4.34 contain the fix for the recent local
privilege escalation, CVE-2013-1763 (3.0.x is not affected). As
usual, there are also fixes throughout the tree and users should upgrade. | | 7:21p |
Firefox OS, Ubuntu and Jolla's Sailfish at MWC (The H) The H briefly covers a panel session at the Mobile World Congress. The panel featured representatives of three Linux-based contenders in the mobile space: Mozilla Chair Mitchell Baker (Firefox OS), Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu for Phones), and Jolla CEO Marc Dillon (Sailfish OS). " Jolla CEO Dillon remarked at the panel that the time was right to give people alternatives, and like Shuttleworth, suggested that his company is doing its best to do so. The Sailfish SDK is based on QtCreator, the Mer project's build engine and an emulator for the operating system. The SDK is released under a combination of open source licences and the company states its goal with Sailfish 'is to develop an open source operating system in co-operation with the community', but it has not made clear what parts of the code, beyond the Mer underpinnings, it intends to open under which specific licences." There is a video of the panel session available as well. | | 8:04p |
Ubuntu discussing moving to LTS + rolling release model Rick Spencer, Canonical's VP of Ubuntu Engineering, has put out a call to discuss dropping the "interim" Ubuntu releases, which are those that are not long term support (LTS) releases, and switching to a rolling release model in between LTS releases. Spencer's "tl;dr":
Ubuntu has an amazing opportunity in the next 7-8 months to deliver a Phone
OS that will be widely adopted by users and industry while also putting
into place the foundation for a truly converged OS.
To succeed at this we will need both velocity and agility. Therefore, I am
starting a discussion about dropping non-LTS releases and move to a rolling
release plus LTS releases right now.
The ubuntu-devel mailing list thread is already getting fairly long as might be guessed.
The idea will also be discussed at the upcoming online Ubuntu Developer Summit, March 5-6. | | 10:19p |
10 years of PyPy The PyPy project, which is working toward the creation of a highly-optimized interpreter for the Python language, is celebrating
its tenth anniversary. " To make it more likely to be accepted,
the proposal for the EU project contained basically every feature under the
sun a language could have. This proved to be annoying, because we had to
actually implement all that stuff. Then we had to do a cleanup sprint where
we deleted 30% of codebase and 70% of features." | | 11:12p |
Google releases a better compression algorithm The Google Open Source Blog has announced the release of the "Zopfli" open source compression algorithm. Though compression cost is high, it could be a win for certain applications:
The output generated by Zopfli is typically 3–8% smaller compared to zlib at maximum compression, and we believe that Zopfli represents the state of the art in Deflate-compatible compression. Zopfli is written in C for portability. It is a compression-only library; existing software can decompress the data. Zopfli is bit-stream compatible with compression used in gzip, Zip, PNG, HTTP requests, and others.
Due to the amount of CPU time required, 2–3 orders of magnitude more than zlib at maximum quality, Zopfli is best suited for applications where data is compressed once and sent over a network many times — for example, static content for the web.
| | 11:22p |
Michaelsen: One On his blog, LibreOffice hacker Bjoern Michaelsen celebrates the conversion to make for LibreOffice builds. Michael Meeks congratulated Michaelsen and the others responsible for " killing our horrible, legacy, internal dmake". Michaelsen looks at the speed improvements that came with the new build system, which reduced the "null build" (nothing to do) from 5 minutes (30 minutes on Windows) to 37 seconds. " There are other things improved with the new build system too. For example, in the old build system, if you wanted to add a library, you had to touch a lot of places (at minimum: makefile.mk for building it, prj/d.lst for copying it, solenv/inc/libs.mk for others to be able to link to it, scp2 to add it to the installation and likely some other things I have forgotten), while now you have to only modify two places: one to describe what to build and one to describe where it ends up in the install. So while the old build system was like a game of jenga, we can now move more confidently and quickly." |
|