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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.9, 6.12.59, and 6.6.117 stable kernels. As usual, he advises users of stable kernels to upgrade.

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, elfutils, expat, firefox, glib2, grub2, helm, kernel, libipa_hbac-devel, libxslt, nvidia-container-toolkit, ongres-scram, openexr, podman, poppler, runc, samba, sssd, thunderbird, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (cups-filters, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-6.14, linux-oracle, linux-realtime, linux-oem-6.14, and linux-realtime-6.14).

Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) is a free operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux and optimised for the Raspberry Pi hardware (the armhf processor architecture). Raspberry Pi OS comes with over 35,000 packages, or pre-compiled software bundled in a nice format for easy installation on a Raspberry Pi. The initial build was completed in June of 2012, but the distribution continues to be active developed with an emphasis on improving the stability and performance of as many Debian packages as possible. Although Debian produces a distribution for the arm architecture, it is compatible only with versions later than the one used on the Raspberry Pi (ARMv7-A CPUs and higher vs the Raspberry Pi's ARMv6 CPU).

Bluestar Linux is a GNU/Linux distribution that is based on Arch Linux. The Bluestar distribution features up to date packages, a full range of desktop and multimedia software in the default installation and a live desktop DVD.

Ultramarine Linux is a Fedora-based distribution featuring extra package repositories such as RPM Fusion and enabling multimedia codecs. Ultramarine can be considered a spiritual successor to Korora Project and aims to make Fedora a more desktop-friendly experience.

Version:6.17.9 (stable) Released:2025-11-24 Source:linux-6.17.9.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.17.9.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.17.9

Version:6.12.59 (longterm) Released:2025-11-24 Source:linux-6.12.59.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.59.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.59

Version:6.6.117 (longterm) Released:2025-11-24 Source:linux-6.6.117.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.117.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.117

LinuxCNC is a Debian-based Linux distribution designed to control computer numerical control (CNC) machines. It can drive milling machines, lathe machines, 3D printers, laser cutters, plasma cutters, robot arms, hexapods and more. It is compatible with many popular machine control hardware interfaces and it supports rigid tapping, cutter compensation, and many other advanced control features. LinuxCNC boots into an Xfce desktop with a custom CNC menu containing CNC software, wizards and documentation.

MagOS Linux is a Russian desktop-oriented distribution based on ROSA, a distribution that was forked from Mandriva Linux in 2011. It uses the RPM package management. MagOS Linux comes with KDE Plasma desktop by default, but it also ships the lightweight LXQt desktop for older and low-specification computers. Besides the standard upstream packages from ROSA, the project also provides its own RPM package repository (with various network and NVIDIA display drivers), as well as separate modules (in XZM format) with extra hardware drivers, server tools, MATE desktop, Wine emulator, Java software and additional web browsers, including Chromium and Yandex.

Linus has released 6.18-rc7, probably the last -rc before the 6.18 release.

So the rc6 kernel wasn't great: we had a last-minute core VM regression that caused people problems.

That's not a great thing late in the release cycle like that, but it was a fairly trivial fix, and the cause wasn't some horrid bug, just a latent gotcha that happened to then bite a late VM fix. So while not great, it also doesn't make me worry about the state of 6.18. We're still on track for a final release next weekend unless some big new problem rears its ugly head.

Version:6.18-rc7 (mainline) Released:2025-11-23 Source:linux-6.18-rc7.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)

Window Maker Live is a Debian-based Linux distribution that applies the Window Maker window manager as the default graphical user interface and integrates well-known open-source components in an attractive and usable user interface. The distribution includes integrated GNOME components.

The Racket programming language project has released Racket version 9.0. Racket is a descendant of Scheme, so it is part of the Lisp family of languages. The headline feature in the release is parallel threads, which adds to the concurrency tools in the language: "While Racket has had green threads for some time, and supports parallelism via futures and places, we feel parallel threads is a major addition." Other new features include the black-box wrapper to prevent the compiler from optimizing calculations away, the decompile-linklet function to map linklets back to an s-expression, the addition of Weibull distributions to the math library, and more.

The Oracle blog has a lengthy article on enhancements to GCC to help detect overflows of flexible array members (FAMs) in C programs.

We describe here two new GNU extensions which specify size information for FAMs. These are a new attribute, "counted_by" and a new builtin function, "__builtin_counted_by_ref". Both extensions can be used in GNU C applications to specify size information for FAMs, improving the buffer overflow detection for FAMs in general.

This work has been covered on LWN as well.

The call for candidates for the 2025 election for the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board has been posted.

The TAB exists to provide advice from the kernel community to the Linux Foundation and holds a seat on the LF's board of directors; it also serves to facilitate interactions both within the community and with outside entities. Over the last year, the TAB has overseen the organization of the Linux Plumbers Conference, advised on the setup of the kernel CVE numbering authority, worked behind the scenes to help resolve a number of contentious community discussions, worked with the Linux Foundation on community conference planning, and more.

Nominations close on December 13.

Vincent OS is Arch-based desktop Linux distribution with KDE Plasma as the preferred desktop. It comes with "Core LivePatch", an in-house patch system with an ability of applying critical and security updates without the need to reboot the computer. Some of the other interesting features and applications of Vincent OS are Microsoft PowerShell (with Bash compatibility), pre-installed Wine for running some Windows programs, out-of-the-box support for Flatpak packages, and the ClamAV toolkit for detecting malware and viruses.

FreeBSD is a UNIX-like operating system for the i386, amd64, IA-64, arm, MIPS, powerpc, ppc64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC platforms based on U.C. Berkeley's "4.4BSD-Lite" release, with some "4.4BSD-Lite2" enhancements. It is also based indirectly on William Jolitz's port of U.C. Berkeley's "Net/2" to the i386, known as "386BSD", though very little of the 386BSD code remains. FreeBSD is used by companies, Internet Service Providers, researchers, computer professionals, students and home users all over the world in their work, education and recreation. FreeBSD comes with over 20,000 packages (pre-compiled software that is bundled for easy installation), covering a wide range of areas: from server software, databases and web servers, to desktop software, games, web browsers and business software - all free and easy to install.

Unpacking Python iterables of various sorts, such as dictionaries or lists, is useful in a number of contexts, including for function arguments, but there has long been a call for extending that capability to comprehensions. PEP 798 ("Unpacking in Comprehensions") was first proposed in June 2025 to fill that gap. In early November, the steering council accepted the PEP, which means that the feature will be coming to Python 3.15 in October 2026. It may be something of a niche feature, but it is an inconsistency that has been apparent for a while—to the point that some Python programmers assume that it is already present in the language.

Version 8.5.0 of the PHP language has been released. Changes include a new "|>" operator that, for some reason, makes these two lines equivalent:

$result = strlen("Hello world"); $result = "Hello world" |> strlen(...);

Other changes include a new function attribute, "#[\NoDiscard]" to indicate that the return value should be used, attributes on constants, and more; see the migration guide for details.