Today brings you some optional updates to the Raspberry Pi Desktop, which gains some modern features while keeping its simplicity. What is currently known as the Raspberry Pi Desktop has been around for over a decade now - it started out as a mildly customised version of the stock LXDE desktop, and over the years has slowly evolved into something with almost entirely different underpinnings, based on Wayland and labwc. The look has been refreshed on several occasions, with new icons, themes and desktop backgrounds, to the point where there is very little visually in common between today’s Raspberry Pi Desktop and the original LXDE. But one thing which has never changed is the overall feel of the desktop, which, with its taskbar, status icons and main menu launcher, is very reminiscent of the state of the art in desktop design from 30 years or so ago, with Windows 95 and Apple System 7.
There is a new disk cloner in this release. Wipe Free Space has been rewritten and no longer depends on an outside tool. Every other program I write has been read line by line and then run against real drives on a bench machine kept for that purpose, and the bugs that came out of it are fixed. Underneath all of that the base system has been rebuilt on Slackware 'Current', the desktop moved from Xfce 4.16 to Xfce 4.20, and the wallpaper changed for the first time in over ten years. The release is named differently too, and it is signed. Both are explained at the end. Parted Magic Clone is new. It copies a disk, a partition, or an image of either, and it produces evidence that the copy is right. The rule it is built around is that the source is never written. Not one byte, no matter what. The source is opened read-only, and every corrective action, whether that is filling in a later slice, repairing a filesystem, growing it to fill a larger disk or repointing a boot loader, happens to the copy, after the copy has been read back and verified.
Deblinux 6.2.1 “Fast Edition” is a lightweight 64-bit GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian 13 “Trixie”, focused on speed, responsiveness, and extending the life of older computers. This release brings a fully updated Gambas-based software suite, an enhanced Toolkit with maintenance, backup and cleanup tools, and a simpler Updater, while retaining multiple desktop options, advanced zRAM, an optimized kernel, Secure Boot support, and essential software preinstalled.
This release presents the new Linux kernel 7.2.4 as well as the new version 153.0.8010.36-1 of the web browser Google-Chrome-Stable. In addition, among other things, Starbuntu has improved its notification app about the upgradable system software.
Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS, code-named 'Noble Numbat', is here. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, together with the community and our partners, to introduce new features and fix bugs. As usual, this point release includes many updates and updated installation media has been provided, so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-severity bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Spaced Linux 9.26 is a major production release focused on upgrade reliability, graphics-driver recovery, desktop startup resilience, signed package delivery, and substantially stronger automated release validation. System updates and upgrade reliability: reworked Spaced Update to handle complete operating system upgrades more safely and predictably; added a dedicated APT transaction guard so package changes are protected during the actual locked package-management operation rather than only during preliminary checks; improved handling of package refreshes, native package upgrades, Flatpak updates, release-marker changes, and error reporting; added explicit testing for upgrades from earlier Spaced Linux installations to reduce the chance of regressions affecting existing users; added package-payload validation to confirm that the packages delivered by the production repository match the expected release; added release-identity checks so the built ISO, installed release metadata, package repository, and release version cannot silently drift apart...
The rc.firewall script now supports reading IP addresses or subnets from on-disk files for the firewall_allowservices and firewall_trusted list variables. Elements that look like absolute paths are read line by line, skipping comments and blank lines, and the first word on each line is treated as an address or subnet. The default history size in sh(1) has been increased from 100 to 128, complying with the POSIX.1-2024 minimum requirement. LTO-10 and LTO-10P density codes and cartridge specifications have been added to mt(1) and libmt, enabling detection and reporting of the new tape formats. The default behaviour of pwd(1) has changed from -P to -L, aligning with POSIX semantics. The ipfw(8) binary now includes a fallback mechanism to support the new kernel interface introduced in FreeBSD 15.0. When running with a 15.0+ kernel, ipfw(8) automatically invokes a bundled ipfw15 binary to load firewall rules, ensuring compatibility during upgrade procedures. The daemon(8) utility now supports the -m option to specify the output file mode, allowing non-root log collectors to access log files.
Announcing NetBSD 9.5. Note: this will be the final release from the netbsd-9 stable branch and also marks the end-of-support for this branch. There will be no further security pullups to this branch! Users running netbsd-9 in production are strongly encouraged to transition to a newer release series, such as netbsd-11 or netbsd-10. Changes since 9.4: system improvements and hardware support - build.sh - various tools build fixes for newer compilers and non-NetBSD platforms; aarch64 - fixed thread-local storage support; x86 - fixed MSI/MSI-X configuration on some machines; mbsnrtowcs(3), wcsnrtombs(3) - added manual pages; acpiout(4) - fixed display brightness controls on certain machines; eap(4) - restore the full set of supported hardware encodings from netbsd-7; uftdi(4) - added support for a range of Brainboxes USB to Serial adapters; urtwn(4) - added support for Mercusys MW150USV2 USB WiFi adapters; urtwn(4) - added support for Asus USB-N10 Nano B1 Wi-Fi adapters; &man.viaide.4 - various improvements in support for several controllers.
Welcome to the 1.14.0 release of Talos. Talos now supports DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) for secure DNS resolution. These features allow Talos to encrypt DNS queries and responses, enhancing privacy and security for DNS traffic. The DNS protocol can be configured on a per-name server basis in the ResolverConfig document, allowing for flexible configuration of DNS resolution. The '--mode=reboot' option has been removed from the talosctl apply-config command; by default, configuration is applied without a reboot. Most configuration changes don't require a reboot; the documentation lists the changes that do. Talos now supports running native BGP routing instances on the host via embedded GoBGP servers, configured with BGPInstanceConfig documents. This removes the need to ship FRR as a system extension for the common fabric-facing use case.
One of the improvements in this milestone is the integration of native Flatpak support directly into the Zenwalk desktop. Flatpak is installed and configured out of the box, with Flathub available as an application source. Installing modern desktop applications no longer requires searching for packages, dealing with dependencies or opening a terminal. Simply open the graphical application store, find the application you want, click Install - and you're done. This provides Zenwalk users with access to a huge ecosystem of up-to-date desktop applications while keeping the traditional Slackware package system available for the core operating system. In other words: Zenwalk packages for the system, Flatpak for applications - and both are ready to use from day one. This milestone moves to the Linux 7.1.7 kernel, providing a modern kernel base together with the BORE (Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer) CPU scheduler patch. BORE is designed with interactive desktop workloads in mind. It aims to improve responsiveness by favoring short, interactive bursts of CPU activity, helping desktop tasks remain responsive even when the system is under heavier CPU load. For a desktop-oriented distribution such as Zenwalk, this makes a particularly good match: applications, window management, multimedia workloads and background processes can coexist while maintaining a responsive user interface. The result is a kernel configuration aimed not simply at benchmark numbers, but at the thing you actually feel when using a desktop: a system that stays responsive.