Science and Technology (old posts, page 242)

Parrot 6.4 released

Parrot is a Debian-based distribution with an emphasis on security improvement and tools; the 6.4 release is now available. "Many tools, like Metasploit, Sliver, Caido and Empire received important updates, the Linux kernel was updated to a more recent version, and the latest LTS version of Firefox was provided with all our privacy oriented patches.".

[$] Following up on the Python JIT

Performance of Python programs has been a major focus of development for the language over the last five years or so; the Faster CPython project has been a big part of that effort. One of its subprojects is to add an experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler to the language; at last year's PyCon US, project member Brandt Bucher gave an introduction to the copy-and-patch JIT compiler. At PyCon US 2025, he followed that up with a talk on "What they don't tell you about building a JIT compiler for CPython" to describe some of the things he wishes he had known when he set out to work on that project. There was something of an elephant in the room, however, in that Microsoft dropped support for the project and laid off most of its Faster CPython team a few days before the talk.

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (redis and thunderbird), Fedora (cef, git, gnutls, httpd, linux-firmware, luajit, mingw-djvulibre, mingw-python-requests, perl, php, python-requests, python3.6, salt, and selenium-manager), Mageia (dpkg, firefox, gnupg2, and golang), Slackware (httpd and kernel), SUSE (afterburn, cmctl, git, go1.23, go1.24, k9s, liboqs-devel, libxml2, php8, python36, trivy, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux-xilinx-zynqmp and nix).

Kernel prepatch 6.16-rc6

Linus has released 6.16-rc6 for testing; it includes a fix for a somewhat scary regression that came up over the week.

So I was flailing around blaming everybody and their pet hamster, because for a while it looked like a drm issue and then a netlink problem (it superficially coincided with separate issues with both of those subsystems).

But I did eventually figure out how to trigger it reliably and then it bisected nicely, and a couple of days have passed, and I'm feeling much better about the release again. We're back on track, and despite that little scare, I think we're in good shape.

319: Red Hat's No-Cost RHEL, Bazzite gets Bazaar, Thunderbird 140, OBS Studio & more Linux news

video: https://youtu.be/aig4jdVoL6o

Comment on the TWIL Forum

This week in Linux, we have another jam packed episode of TWIL. Red Hat announced No-Cost RHEL for business developers, MIPS has been acquired, the Bazzite team have a brand new app store, and we have new releases from Thunderbird, OBS Studio, Bash and more! All of this and more on This Week in Linux, the weekly news show that keeps you up to date with what’s going on in the Linux and Open Source world. Now let's jump right into Your Source for Linux GNews!

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro
00:36 Red Hat Announces No-Cost RHEL For Business Developers
03:42 GlobalFoundries acquires MIPS
05:33 Bazzite gets new app-store & devices
09:34 Sandfly Security, agentless Linux security
11:38 OBS Studio 31.1 Released
14:30 Mozilla VPN Linux App is Now Available on Flathub
18:04 Thunderbird 140 Released
21:06 Bash 5.3 Released
22:03 Outro

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