Tag: fedora
Fedora 38 beta has arrived and it heralds a spectacular upcoming release
New Distro ‘blendOS’ Combines Arch Linux, Fedora Linux and Ubuntu
blendOS is here to offer you “a seamless blend of all Linux distributions,” as its creator wants to call it. blendOS is based on Arch Linux and GNOME on Wayland, but it lets you use apps from other popular distributions, such as Fedora Linux or Ubuntu.
This is possible because you can use the native package managers from Arch Linux (pacman — included by default), Fedora Linux (dnf), and Ubuntu (apt), which are included as containers using Distrobox/Podman. However, the DNF and APT package managers aren’t included in the live ISO image, nor blendOS’s own blend package manager…. It also follows a rolling release model, since it’s derived from Arch Linux.
Even if it comes with the GNOME desktop by default on the live ISO image, blendOS will let you deploy a new installation with another popular desktop environment, such as KDE Plasma, MATE, or Xfce, or even window managers like Sway or i3. Apart from the fact that you can install any app from any of the supported Linux distributions, blendOS also comes with out-of-the-box support for sandboxed Flatpak apps, which you can easily install directly from the Flathub Store app, which is a Web App that puts the Flathub website on your desktop.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fedora Change Proposal: Supporting Unified Kernel Images for Improved Security
Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place.
Unified Kernel Images have been championed by the systemd folks for better securing and trusting Linux distributions. Unified kernel images are a combination of the kernel image, initrd, and UEFI stub program all distributed as one…. The initial phase would focus on shipping a UKI as an optional sub-RPM that users can opt into initially, updating kernel install scripts so unified kernels are installed and properly updated, and bootloader support for unified kernel images. Adding systemd-boot support to the installers, better measurement and remote attestation support, and switching Fedora Cloud images to using unified kernels are among the additional goals but of lower priority.
Fedora’s wiki includes a detailed description of the change proposal:
The goal is to move away from initrd images being generated on the installed machine. They are generated while building the kernel package instead, then shipped as part of a unified kernel image. A unified kernel image is an all-in-one efi binary containing kernel, initrd, cmdline and signature….
Main motivation for this move is to make the distro more robust and more secure.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fedora 38 To Prohibit Byte Swapped Xorg and Xwayland Clients
The Xorg and Xwayland implementation of this feature has gone largely untested, the number of Fedora users that use it are virtually zero, and considering the number of attack vectors this has presented historically, setting the default to deny clients that require this seems the better way to do.
This change will be to the xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland packages and those needing the feature turned back will need to add “AllowSwappedClients” “on” to their xorg.conf.d file in the “ServerFlags” section. Xwayland users will need to pass the +byteswappedclients flag, however, the compositor will need to be able to handle this flag which at this time GNOME does not.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What’s New in Fedora 37
The beta for Fedora 37 is available now, and a full release is due on October 18, 2022 (with October 25 as a fallback date in case of late-surfacing bugs). Here’s a preview of what to expect from the latest release of this uber-stable Linux distribution.