Linux Weekly News

In mid-October, the Xubuntu download site was compromised and had directed users to a malicious zip file instead of the Torrent file that users expected. Elizabeth K. Joseph has published a postmortem of the incident, along with plans to avoid such a breach in the future:

To be perfectly clear: this only impacted our website, and the torrent links provided there.

If you downloaded or opened a file named "Xubuntu-Safe-Download.zip" from the Xubuntu downloads page during this period, you should assume it was malicious. We strongly recommend scanning your computer with a trusted antivirus or anti-malware solution and deleting the file immediately.

Nothing on cdimages.ubuntu.com or any of the other official Ubuntu repositories was impacted, and our mirrors remained safe as long as they were also mirroring from official resources.

None of the build systems, packages, or other components of Xubuntu itself were impacted.

Recordings from the GStreamer Conference 2025, held in London in late October, are now available on the GStreamer Conferences Archive site. Includes the GStreamer State of the Union talk by Tim-Philipp Müller, State of MPEG 2 Transport Stream (MPEG-TS) by Edward Hervey, and many others.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (pdfminer), Fedora (chromium and firefox), Mageia (bubblewrap, flatpak, cups-filters, and thunderbird), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8, kernel, and squid), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (gimp, itextpdf, kernel, thunderbird, and unbound), and Ubuntu (lasso).

Version 5.0 of the Blender animation system has been released. Notable improvements include improved color management, HDR capabilities, and a new storyboarding template. See the release notes for a lengthy list of new features and changes, and the bugfixes page for the 588 commits that fixed bugs in Blender 4.5 or older.

There have been several recent announcements about Linux distributions changing the list of architectures they support, or adjusting how they build binaries for some versions of those architectures. Ubuntu introduced architecture variants, Fedora considered dropping support for i686 but reversed course after some pushback, and Debian developers have discussed raising its architecture baseline for the upcoming Debian 14 ("forky"). Linux supports a large number of architectures, and it's not always clear where or by whom they are used. With increasing concerns about diminishing support for legacy architectures, it's a good time to look at the overall state of architecture support on Linux.

The Homebrew project is an open-source package-management system that comes with a repository of useful packages for Linux and macOS. Even though Linux distributions have their own package management and repositories, Homebrew is often used to obtain software that is not available in a distribution's repository or to install more current versions of projects than are available from long-term-support (LTS) distributions. Homebrew 5.0.0, released on November 12, 2025, expanded Linux support to include 64-bit Arm packages in addition to x86_64, and turned on concurrent downloads by default to speed up package downloads.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libwebsockets), Fedora (chromium and fvwm3), Mageia (apache, firefox, and postgresql13, postgresql15), Oracle (idm:DL1), Red Hat (bind, bind9.18, firefox, and openssl), SUSE (alloy, ghostscript, and openssl-1_0_0), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg and freeglut).

Version 2.52.0 of the Git source-code management system has been released. Changes include a new last-modified command to find the closest ancestor commit that touched one or more paths, a couple of git refs improvements, a new git repo command for obtaining information about the repository itself, and more. See the announcement and this GitHub blog entry for more information.

For better or for worse, the NUMA node is the abstraction used by the kernel to keep track of different types of memory. How that abstraction is used, though, is still an active area of development. Two patch sets focused on this problem are currently under review; one addresses the perennial problem of promoting heavily used folios from slower to faster memory, while the other aims to improve the kernel's handling of nodes containing special memory installed for a specific purpose.

Debian developer Simon Josefsson has announced the Debian Libre Live Images project, to allow installing Debian without any non-free software:

Since the 2022 decision on non-free firmware, the official images for bookworm and trixie contains non-free software.

The Debian Libre Live Images project provides Live ISO images for Intel/AMD-compatible 64-bit x86 CPUs (amd64) built without any non-free software, suitable for running and installing Debian. The images are similar to the Debian Live Images distributed as Debian live images.

He does warn that this is a first public release, so there may be problems. See the current list of known issues before trying the images out.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-plugins-base1.0, lasso, and thunderbird), Fedora (bind9-next, chromium, containerd, fvwm3, luksmeta, opentofu, python-pdfminer, python-uv-build, ruff, rust-get-size-derive2, rust-get-size2, rust-regex, rust-regex-automata, rust-reqsign, rust-reqsign-aws-v4, rust-reqsign-command-execute-tokio, rust-reqsign-core, rust-reqsign-file-read-tokio, rust-reqsign-http-send-reqwest, suricata, uv, and xmedcon), Mageia (apache-commons-beanutils, apache-commons-fileupload, apache-commons-lang, botan2, python-django, spdlog, stardict, webkit2, and yelp-xsl), Slackware (xpdf), and SUSE (bind, chromedriver, firefox, kernel, libxml2, and openssh).

Linus has released 6.18-rc6 for testing. "So we have a slightly larger rc6 than usual, but I think it's just the random noise and a result of pull request timings rather than due to any issues with the release. But I guess we have a couple of weeks remaining to find out."

One of the many objectives of the Linux Kernel Self-Protection Project (KSPP), which just completed ten years of work, is to ensure that all array references can be bounds-checked, even in the case of flexible array members, the size of which is not known at compile time. One of the most challenging flexible array members in the kernel is not even declared as such. Almost exactly one year ago, LWN looked at the effort to increase safety around the networking subsystem's heavily used sockaddr structure. One year later, Kees Cook is still looking for a way to bring this work to a close.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (keystone and lxd), Fedora (docker-buildkit, firefox, gh, gitleaks, lasso, runc, and seamonkey), Mageia (perl-Authen-SASL, perl-Cpanel-JSON-XS, perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA, perl-JSON-XS, python-flask-cors, python-py, python-setuptools, and ruby), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk), SUSE (binutils, cargo-packaging, rust-bindgen, chromium, go-sendxmpp, helm, lasso, libxml2, openssh, openssh8.4, python-Django, python-Scrapy-doc, python311-Brotli, squid, tomcat10, and weblate), and Ubuntu (linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8 and linux-xilinx-zynqmp).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.8 and 6.12.58 stable kernels. Each contains an important set of fixes. Users are advised to upgrade.

The Google Security Blog has a new post on just how well the use of Rust is working out for the Android project.

We adopted Rust for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Android's C and C++ code. But the biggest surprise was Rust's impact on software delivery. With Rust changes having a 4x lower rollback rate and spending 25% less time in code review, the safer path is now also the faster one.

The SUSE Security Team has published an in-depth article on its findings after reviewing a D-Bus service contained in LightDM Greeter by KDE (the lightdm-kde-greeter package) for addition to openSUSE Tumbleweed. The team found a privilege escalation from the lightdm service user to root, as well as other attack vectors in the service:

In agreement with upstream, we assigned CVE-2025-62876 to track the lightdm service user to root privilege escalation aspect described in this report. The severity of the issue is low, since it only affects defense-in-depth (if the lightdm service user were compromised) and the problematic logic can only be reached and exploited if triggered interactively by a privileged user.

The fixes are contained in the 6.0.4 release of the project.

Version 145 of the Thunderbird email client has been released. Notable changes in this release include enabling DNS over HTTPS, support for Microsoft Exchange via Exchange Web Services, and quite a few bug fixes. As of 145, the project is no longer shipping 32-bit binaries for Linux on x86.

Many distributions provide support out of the proverbial box for Flatpak packages, but Fedora is unusual in that it also provides, and defaults, to its own repository of Fedora-built Flatpaks. This has been a source of confusion for Fedora users, who expect to get the Flatpak built by the original developers and hosted on Flathub. It has also been a source of conflict with upstream projects, because users complain of bugs in Flatpak packages they are not responsible for. The situation has also frustrated some Fedora developers, who would prefer to offer put Flathub's offerings first. A new complaint that Fedora has apparently used manifests from Flathub to build the packages for Fedora—without giving credit to the original authors—has spurred discussions about Fedora's Flatpaks once again. While no concrete changes are on the table, yet, there may be some movement toward addressing persistent complaints.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and firefox-esr), Fedora (firefox, rubygem-rack, skopeo, and webkitgtk), Mageia (perl, perl-CPAN, perl-HTTP-Tiny, perl-Data-Entropy, perl-FCGI, perl-File-Find-Rule, perl-YAML-LibYAML, python-tornado, python-urllib3, python-pip, python3, and unbound), Oracle (ipa and kernel), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, krb5, openssl, pcs, podman, and runc), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (binutils, kernel, netty, netty-tcnative, podman, python311-pdfminer, and tomcat11), and Ubuntu (bind9 and linux-aws-6.8).