The extra locations added for the promotion include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Thailand.
Being able to pick a specific server matters when location is more important than raw speed; by default, Firefox VPN connects you to the fastest server, which is usually the nearest one. That manual server-selection option arrived with Firefox 151 back in May, though it’s still rolling out gradually and isn’t switched on for everyone yet.
Once the promotion ends on September 1, free accounts revert to a 50GB monthly data limit and the smaller set of locations. The limited-time offer is presumably meant to give people a taste of the paid Mozilla VPN service.
The built-in VPN is included free with Firefox in the US, UK, France, Germany and Canada. There are no add-ons to install — it’s baked into desktop Firefox — but you do need to sign in with a free Mozilla account to switch it on, and access is granted server-side as part of a progressive rollout.
It’s a browser-only VPN rather than a system-wide one, but it does support per-site exceptions, so you can stop specific websites from being routed through it — handy for sites that need to see your real location.
Source: OMG! Ubuntu
]]>Arriving about a month after DietPi 10.4, the headline change is that KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) and DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) are now enabled by default on Raspberry Pi boards whenever you install a graphical app or desktop environment through DietPi-Software. The behavior can still be toggled from a new entry under DietPi-Config’s Display Options.
Raspberry Pi users also get an updated Camera setting in DietPi-Config that can switch on the modern camera stack via the libcamera API. For the NanoPi K2, the release fixes a bug that prevented setting a static Ethernet MAC address through the ethaddr variable — though on existing installs you’ll need to flash U-Boot via DietPi-Config’s Advanced Options for it to take effect.
On the software side, DietPi-Software now enables the RustDesk client on ARMv7 and fixes an ownCloud Infinite Scale regression that broke password logins on fresh installs. DietPi-Config, meanwhile, gains a revamped display menu, options to configure the GRUB terminal and early-boot console resolution, and a fix for the RTC mode option not showing up.
This release also drops several older, device-specific options — the per-device resolution menus for Raspberry Pi and Odroid, plus Raspberry Pi headless mode, HDMI rotation, and PSU noise reduction. Full details are in the release notes on GitHub.
DietPi 10.5 is available now from the official website; existing users only need to update their installations.
Source: 9to5Linux
]]>Despite a busy cycle that saw a growing number of AI/LLM-reported bugs across the kernel, 7.1 landed on time. It brings a long list of new features: a new NTFS driver, Intel FRED for better performance on Panther Lake and future CPUs, faster Intel Arc Battlemage graphics, improvements for older AMD Radeon GPUs, and plenty more. The full feature overview covers everything in this now-stable release.
The kernel can already be pulled from Git. In his release note, Torvalds explained the early timing — he is simply in a different timezone while traveling — and warned that the upcoming merge window may be “a bit irregular” as he works through part of it offline. As for the final week of changes, he described it as “nothing particularly interesting or scary,” mostly smaller driver updates across GPU, networking, and sound.
Attention now turns to Linux 7.2 and the next kernel cycle.
Source: Phoronix
]]>According to Microsoft’s Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman, the release includes the source for the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, and classic utilities such as CHKDSK.
A quick bit of context: the operating system that became MS-DOS started life as 86-DOS (originally “QDOS,” for “quick and dirty operating system”), written by programmer Tim Paterson for an Intel 8086 computer kit from Seattle Computer Products. Needing an OS for the still-unfinished IBM PC, Microsoft licensed 86-DOS, hired Paterson, and eventually bought the rights outright. It then licensed the system to IBM as PC-DOS while selling its own version, MS-DOS, to everyone else — the version that rode the wave of IBM PC clones to dominance through the 1980s and ’90s.
What makes this release remarkable is that the code had never been stored digitally. A group of historians and preservationists calling itself the “DOS Disassembly Group” — led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini — transcribed and scanned it from paper printouts supplied by Paterson, a task made harder because modern OCR tools struggled with the decades-old pages.
This isn’t Microsoft’s first trip into its own archives. The company open-sourced MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 back in 2014, MS-DOS 4.0 in 2024, and along the way has released code for the game Zork, 1995’s 3D Movie Maker, and a remake of the old MS-DOS Editor. The earlier MS-DOS versions all live in the same GitHub repository.
It probably won’t be the last rediscovery, either: just two years ago, the oldest known build of 86-DOS itself was found and uploaded to the Internet Archive.
Source: Ars Technica
]]>COSMIC is built in Rust and licensed under GPLv3 for apps and MPL-2.0 for libraries. It follows Freedesktop specifications, is not tied to any single distribution, and uses the Iced toolkit for a clean, type-safe, and reactive interface.
--no-xwayland launch option.The result feels fast and responsive, with the work on animations, panel hiding, and touchpad scrolling making everyday use noticeably smoother. Decoupling the systemd components is also a sensible step toward running COSMIC on a wider range of setups.
COSMIC 1.1.0 ships now in Pop!_OS 24.04. You can grab the latest ISO from the official Pop!_OS download page, and existing Pop!_OS 24.04 users can simply update their system. Packages are also expected soon in Fedora, NixOS, Arch Linux, openSUSE, Redox, and CachyOS, among others.
Source code and build instructions are available in the cosmic-epoch repository.
Source: DebugPoint
]]>Another key update is the addition of usb-signaller, a new Rust-based tool now integrated into postmarketOS edge, partially replacing the previous role of usb-moded.
Moreover, usb-signaller now offers a simpler solution. It enables USB gadget initialization without initramfs scripts, supports transactional mode and gadget switching for improved reliability, provides clearer logging, handles missing kernel drivers, and includes OpenRC support. The latest version also implements USB role switching between host and device modes.
Duranium, the systemd-based image for postmarketOS, also received several updates. Waydroid can now be enabled with Duranium via sysext by running updatectl enable waydroid, simplifying Android app compatibility.
In addition, Duranium now uses systemd/bootctl on systems with EFI variable support to keep a fallback bootloader available during updates. If an updated bootloader turns out to be broken, the system can automatically boot into the fallback option instead.
On the device support side, the linux-postmarketos-qcom-sdm845 kernel package has been updated to Linux 7.1. Among other improvements, the LG G7 ThinQ now has working touchscreen support, along with additional changes that were mainlined through the device tree.
The postmarketOS team has also continued to clean up its package base, with unmaintained packages moved to an archived category. There are stricter requirements for devices in the testing category as well. Their kernels must now be no older than the oldest currently supported LTS kernel listed on kernel.org, and those kernels must be built with LLVM.
Another cleanup measure is the removal of armhf, or armv6, support from postmarketOS edge. The architecture was never released or widely used, yet required ongoing maintenance.
For more details, see the official announcement.
Source: Linuxiac
]]>Yserver, a project written from scratch in Rust, has reached version 1.0, marking the first stable-tagged release of an effort that aims to provide a modern X11 server for current Linux systems.
According to the project, it does not seek to replicate X.Org Server feature by feature. Instead, its goal is to back modern desktop environments, window managers, and applications while removing legacy X11 components such as multiple screens, non-TrueColor visuals, indirect GLX, the DDX driver ABI, and endian-swapped clients.
So, looks like X11 is still not ready to fade away quietly. With XLibre already bringing fresh attention to the space, Yserver now adds another noteworthy development as X11’s long-term future is uncertain within the Linux desktop ecosystem.
And even though most major desktops now default to Wayland, X11 is still widely used, particularly by those relying on legacy workflows, specific window managers, or applications that perform better under X11.
Currently, Yserver’s main feature is its standalone DRM/KMS server, which can run full MATE, Xfce, and Cinnamon desktop sessions. The project has also tested window managers such as FVWM3, e16, and Window Maker.
On top of that, Yserver offers a wide range of X11 extensions, including BIG-REQUESTS, Composite, DAMAGE, DPMS, DRI3, GLX, MIT-SHM, Present, RANDR, RENDER, SHAPE, SYNC, XFIXES, XInputExtension, XKEYBOARD, and XTEST.
The project’s hardware testing includes AMD, Intel, NVIDIA with the proprietary driver, Snapdragon X1 with Adreno graphics, Apple M1 and M2 systems running Asahi Linux, and virtio-gpu in virtualized environments. Tested desktop sessions include MATE, Xfce, and Cinnamon.
However, some limitations remain. For example, GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is implemented and tested on AMD, Intel, Asahi, and Qualcomm hardware, but does not work with NVIDIA’s proprietary driver. VT switching is also limited, depending on how the server is launched, particularly in LightDM sessions.
Yserver can be launched directly from a TTY or used with LightDM for graphical logins. It requires a recent stable Rust toolchain and system dependencies such as libseat, libxkbcommon, libinput, fontconfig, and related graphics components.
At this stage, keep in mind that Yserver is an experimental yet technically significant project and is not a drop-in replacement for X.Org Server. However, its ability to run full MATE, Xfce, and Cinnamon sessions makes its first stable release noteworthy.
For additional details, see the project’s GitHub repo.
Source: Linuxiac
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