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The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced the results of its recent board of directors election. Ruth Suehle and McCoy Smith are new to the board, while Carlo Piana will serve another term. The results, however, seem tainted in the eyes of some participants and observers. The election has been plagued by missteps from the beginning. It has culminated with the exclusion of three candidates for failing to meet a requirement to sign the OSI board agreement, which was added after the election was over and before results were tallied or announced.

As a system runs and its memory becomes fragmented, allocating large, physically contiguous regions of memory becomes increasingly difficult. Much effort over the years has gone into avoiding the need to make such allocations whenever possible, but there are times when they simply cannot be avoided. The kernel's contiguous memory allocator (CMA) subsystem attempts to make such allocations possible, but it has never been a perfect solution. Suren Baghdasaryan is is trying to improve that situation with the guaranteed contiguous memory allocator patch set, which includes work from Minchan Kim as well.

Julien Malka has called for the NixOS project to use build-reproducibility to detect when a program has a maintainer-generated tarball that results in a different artifact than building from source. There are good reasons for projects to release maintainer-generated tarballs, but since the materials included in them are usually documentation, extra build scripts, and so on, it makes sense to check that they don't influence the final build output. While this would not have stopped last year's XZ backdoor, it would have made it harder to hide.

People are often convinced that OSS is more trustworthy than closed-source software because the code can be audited by practitioners and security professionals in order to detect vulnerabilities or backdoors. In this instance, this procedure has been made difficult by the fact that part of the code activating the backdoor was not included in the sources available within the git repository but was instead present in the maintainer-provided tarball. While this was used to hide the backdoor out of sight of most investigating eyes, this is also an opportunity for us to improve our software supply chain security processes.

Brendan Jackman has been working to try to get ahead of the next hardware CPU vulnerability before it gets discovered. In January, he posted the second version of a patch set that introduces address-space isolation (ASI) as a way of preventing future CPU vulnerabilities from leaking important information. The core concept is to ensure that data that is not currently needed is not present in memory, so that speculative execution cannot leak it. The work is nowhere near ready to be incorporated into the mainline kernel — not least of all because it has a large performance impact in its current form — but it is likely to once again be a topic of discussion at the 2025 Linux Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit.

This article examines the best PHP microframeworks. Micro means the framework is small, with little or no tools and libraries. Microframeworks are designed with extensibility in mind.

The post 6 Best Free and Open Source PHP Microframeworks appeared first on Linux Today.

Debian 12.10 is here a little over two months after Debian 12.9 as the ninth point release of Debian Bookworm. Yes, ninth, because Debian 12.3 was never released due to an issue in the EXT4 file system leading to data corruption, which means that it doesn’t count as a point release.

The post Debian 12.10 “Bookworm” Released with 66 Bug Fixes and 43 Security Updates appeared first on Linux Today.

Raspberry Pi has announced rpi-image-gen, a tool to create custom software images for its devices.

rpi-image-gen is a Bash orientated scripting engine capable of producing software images with different on-disk partition layouts, file systems and profiles using collections of metadata and a defined flow of execution. It provides the means to create a highly customised software image for your Raspberry Pi device. rpi-image-gen is human readable, auditable and easy to use.

The Git repository for rpi-image-gen has a number of examples to help users get started making their own custom images.

We’ve surveyed all of the graphical email clients that run under Linux and make our picks.

The post 11 Best Free and Open Source Graphical Email Clients appeared first on Linux Today.

Arch-based SystemRescue 12, designed for file recovery, backups, and OS repairs, brings kernel 6.12 LTS, bcachefs support, and more.

The post SystemRescue 12 Released with Bcachefs Support appeared first on Linux Today.

In this guide, we will learn how to replace text across multiple files efficiently using a Bash script in Linux.

The post How To Replace Text In Multiple Files Using A Bash Script In Linux appeared first on Linux Today.

The Asahi Linux project, working to support Linux on Apple hardware, has published a progress report to coincide with the 6.14 kernel release.

Now that Rust for Linux abstractions are starting to be merged at a healthy pace, we are faced with an emerging challenge. It is rare for any kernel patch to survive the mailing list without at least a couple of non-trivial changes, and Rust abstractions are no exception. Every time an abstraction used by our driver is merged, we must drop our downstream version and rebase the driver atop the version accepted upstream. This is grueling, menial, and unpleasant work, and Janne has our deepest gratitude for volunteering his time to get through it.

This article will teach you about the different types of files on Linux, what the root directory is, what the /dev directory is for, and what the /dev/sda device files are.

The post Purpose of /dev/sda on Linux (When to Use It with an Example) appeared first on Linux Today.

Learn how to fix the “wget command not found” error in Linux by installing wget, configuring the system PATH, or using alternatives like curl.

The post Fixing the “wget: command not found” Error in Linux appeared first on Linux Today.

Firefox’s most popular top 10 add-ons are heavily dominated by ad blockers, revealing a strong user preference for ad-free browsing.

The post uBlock Origin is the Most Popular Firefox Add-on appeared first on Linux Today.

Besides readying releases of its own latest Linux distributions, SUSE announced new support options for obsolete Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS.

The post SUSE Displays Enhanced Enterprise Linux at SUSECON appeared first on Linux Today.

KDE Frameworks 6.12 continues the monthly KDE Frameworks releases with a background for the navigation bar of the Dolphin file manager and Gwenview image viewer, support for the kded6 daemon to restart automatically in the background when it crashes, and MIME-type icons for Kdenlive project files in the Breeze icon theme.

The post KDE Frameworks 6.12 Released with Various Improvements and Bug Fixes appeared first on Linux Today.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (fluent-bit, openssh, php, and webkitgtk), Mageia (freerdp), Oracle (libreoffice and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (kernel-rt), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (apptainer, gitea-tea, libxml2, tomcat, webkit2gtk3, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (libxslt and pam-pkcs11).

ReactOS is a free and open-source operating system based on the best design principles found in the Windows NT architecture. Written completely from scratch, ReactOS is not a Linux-based system and it shares none of the UNIX architecture. The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is binary compatible with Windows. This will allow Windows applications and drivers to run as they would on a Windows system. Additionally, the look and feel of the Windows operating system is used, such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of Windows would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow people to use it as an alternative to Windows without the need to change software they are used to.

Version:next-20250321 (linux-next) Released:2025-03-21

DragonOS is a Lubuntu-based desktop distribution which is focused on software defined radio (SDR). The distribution provides a pre-installed suite of the most powerful and accessible open source SDR software. DragonOS has verified support for a range of inexpensive and powerful SDR hardware, including RTL-SDR, HackRF One, LimeSDR, BladeRF, and others.