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Over time, many Linux users wind up with a collection of aliases, shell scripts, and makefiles to run simple commands (or a series of commands) that are often used, but challenging to remember and annoying to type out at length. The just command runner is a Rust-based utility that just does one thing and does it well: it reads recipes from a text file (aptly called a "justfile"), and runs the commands from an invoked recipe. Rather than accumulating a library of one-off shell scripts over time,…

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 5.4.302 stable kernel: This is the LAST 5.4.y release. It is now end-of-life and should not be used by anyone, anymore. As of this point in time, there are 1539 documented unfixed CVEs for this kernel branch, and that number will only increase over time as more CVEs get assigned for kernel bugs. For the curious, Kroah-Hartman has also provided a list of the unfixed CVEs for 5.4.302.

Let's Encrypt has announced that it will be reducing the validity period of its certificates from 90 days to 45 days by 2028: Most users of Let's Encrypt who automatically issue certificates will not have to make any changes. However, you should verify that your automation is compatible with certificates that have shorter validity periods. To ensure your ACME client renews on time, we recommend using ACME Renewal Information (ARI) . ARI is a feature we've introduced to help clients know when th…

FreeBSD 15.0 has been released. Notable changes in this release include a new method for installing the base system using the pkg package manager , an update to OpenZFS 2.4.0-rc4 , native support for the inotify(2) interface, and the addition of Open Container Initiative (OCI) images to FreeBSD's release artifacts. See the release notes for a full list of changes, hardware notes for supported hardware, and check the errata before installing or upgrading.

The designers of the Zig programming language have been working to find a suitable design for asynchronous code for some time. Zig is a carefully minimalist language, and its initial design for asynchronous I/O did not fit well with its other features. Now, the project has announced (in a Zig SHOWTIME video) a new approach to asynchronous I/O that promises to solve the function coloring problem, and allows writing code that will execute correctly using either synchronous or asynchronous I/O.

There are many possible programmer mistakes that are not caught by the minimal checks specified by the C language; among those is passing an array of the wrong size to a function. A recent attempt to add some safety around array parameters within the crypto layer involved the use of some clever tricks, but it turns out that clever tricks are unnecessary in this case. There is an obscure C feature that can cause this checking to happen, and it is already in use in a few places within the kernel.

Linus Torvalds released the 6.18 kernel as expected on November 30, closing the last full development cycle of 2025. It was another busy cycle, featuring a record number of developers. The time has come for a look at where the code came from for this kernel release, but also for the year-long long-term-support cycle which has also reached its conclusion with this release.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.10 , 6.12.60 , and 6.6.118 stable kernels. As usual, each contains a number of important fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.

Linus has released the 6.18 kernel , as expected. So I'll have to admit that I'd have been happier with slightly less bugfixing noise in this last week of the release, but while there's a few more fixes than I would hope for, there was nothing that made me feel like this needs more time to cook. So 6.18 is tagged and pushed out. Headline changes in this release include the ability to manage namespaces with file handles, support for the AccECN congestion-control protocol, initial support for sig…

Version 25.11 of the NixOS distribution has been released. " The 25.11 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2742 contributors, who authored 59430 commits since the previous release ". Changes include 7,002 new packages, GNOME 49, LLVM 21, a new COSMIC desktop environment beta, firewalld support, and more; see the release notes for details.

The prizrak.me blog is carrying an introduction to the Landlock security module . Landlock shines when an application has a predictable set of files or directories it needs. For example, a web server could restrict itself to accessing only /var/www/html and /tmp . Unlike SELinux or AppArmor, Landlock policies don't require administrator involvement or system-wide configuration. Developers can embed policies directly in application code, making sandboxing a natural part of the development proces…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, binutils, delve and golang, expat, firefox, haproxy, kernel, libsoup3, libssh, libtiff, openssh, openssl, pam, podman, python-kdcproxy, shadow-utils, squid, thunderbird, vim, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and zziplib), Debian (cups-filters, libsdl2, linux-6.1, net-snmp, pdfminer, rails, and tryton-sao), Fedora (chromium, docker-buildkit, docker-buildx, and sudo-rs), Gentoo (librnp), Mageia (webkit2), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, buildah, curl, dpdk, …

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, firefox, go-rpm-macros, kernel, kernel-rt, podman, and thunderbird), Debian (erlang, python-gevent, and r-cran-gh), Fedora (buildah, chromium, k9s, kubernetes1.33, kubernetes1.34, podman, python-mkdocs-include-markdown-plugin, and webkitgtk), Gentoo (Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge. Opera, qtsvg, redict, redis, UDisks, and WebKitGTK+), Mageia (cups-filters and ruby-rack), Oracle (kernel and libssh), Red Hat (.NET 8.0, tigervnc, xo…

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (calibre, chromium, cri-o1.32, cri-o1.33, cri-o1.34, dotnet10.0, dovecot, gnutls, gopass, gopass-hibp, gopass-jsonapi, kubernetes1.31, kubernetes1.32, kubernetes1.33, kubernetes1.34, and linux-firmware), Mageia (ffmpeg, kernel, kmod-xtables-addons & kmod-virtualbox, kernel-linus, konsole, and redis), Red Hat (bind and bind-dyndb-ldap and kernel), SUSE (act, alloy, amazon-ssm-agent, ansible-12, ansible-core, blender, chromium, cups-filters, curl, elfut…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (delve and golang), Debian (webkit2gtk), Oracle (expat and thunderbird), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (openvpn), SUSE (chromium, grub2, and kernel), and Ubuntu (cups-filters, imagemagick, and libcupsfilters).