#linux

Agent Name Service is Now Part of The Linux Foundation Agent Name Service (ANS) now has a home at the Linux Foundation. The launch happened at KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City, and you might remember that the foundation first announced its plans for the project way back in June. GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Salesforce, and DigiCert are among the organizations now involved with ANS, bringing the total number up to eleven. One of the early deployments of ANS has been in AGNTCY, another project under the foundation, where its directory of AI agents can now check an agent’s ANS identity. Announcing the move, Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, had this to share: Autonomous AI agents are transacting and operating across global systems, but they can't succeed without verifiable identity. Under the neutral governance of the Linux Foundation, ANS provides a common foundation for trust that the entire industry can adopt, implement and improve together. An explainer Platforms identify AI agents in their own ways, and a service that receives a request from one has no standardized way to confirm who the agent represents. ANS tackles this by linking each agent to a domain name its operator owns, the same way a website is tied to its domain. Each version of an agent gets its own name, such as ans://v1.4.2.travel.example.com. To register an agent, the operator first has to prove it controls that domain. Certificates are then issued for the agent, and every registration goes into a public log that anyone can read. ANS also publishes details about each agent in DNS, the internet’s address book, and other systems can then look them up with tools they already use. The main DNS records use a format from a separate project called DNS-AID. ANS adds one record of its own that points to the agent’s entry in the public log. When an agent sends a request, the receiving system can check that its registration exists, that it has not been revoked, and that the agent really holds the key tied to it. ANS only covers who the agent is. Deciding what it can do is left to the receiving system, and platforms have to add the check themselves. The setup behind ANS A technical steering committee now oversees the project. It starts with five seats, held by three people from GoDaddy, Ken Huang of DistributedApps.ai, and Michael Kantor of Hashgraph Online (HOL). That lineup is only a starting point. The first election has to be held within 12 months, and after it, the charter prevents any one company from holding half or more of the seats (to ensure vendor neutrality, I assume). The charter also mentions that meetings are meant to be open to the public and that discussions and decisions should be visible to everyone. As for all the code in the project, the Go, Rust, and Java libraries currently use the MIT license, but new code contributed from now on has to use the Apache 2.0 license. Some lore info ANS began in 2025 as a draft sent to the IETF, the internet standards body, and a follow-up came in October. Drafts like these have no formal standing at the IETF and are not endorsed by it. At present, the Linux Foundation calls the specification formalized. The reference code and a local demo are on the project’s GitHub page, and the specifications are on ansinfo.ai.

Hello, #Fedora #Linux 45! ​ #Fedora45

Firefox's free built-in VPN removes its data limit (until next year) - OMG! Ubuntu From 10 November, you can enable the free VPN in Firefox and browse as much as you like, for as long as you like, without needing to worry about reaching the fixed monthly limit. ‘Whether you’re heading home to see family this winter or taking a well-earned break before the year wraps up, we want you to browse with a little more peace of mind’, Mozilla’s LLM-aided blog screed insincerely enthuses. Mozilla ran a similar promotion in June (when it also temporarily bumped the number of server locations to proxy browsing traffic through to a generous 28). On 1 February 2027, Firefox VPN snaps back to a 50GB monthly data limit. Making use of the free VPN does require that you sign in with a Mozilla account (that only costs the price of an email address). Per-site exceptions can be set, so that visiting certain websites won’t use a VPN. It also works in private mode. But Firefox VPN is not a regular VPN. It only masks your activity inside of the browser. To obscure connections from other apps, desktop services, and so on you need a proper VPN – Mozilla happens to sell one, Mozilla VPN. Unlimited data means you can flip the VPN on for one of the available locations and not worry too much about what you get up to on data-heavy sites like YouTube – set and forget, ahoy (well, until you’re bored of search results in German).

Libreboot 26.11 Released with Full UEFI Support, Drops GRUB Payload Libreboot, the free and open-source boot firmware project that replaces proprietary BIOS and UEFI firmware on supported hardware, has released version 26.11, transitioning to full UEFI support through the MrChromebox EDK2 payload, which also makes it compatible with Microsoft Windows. With this release, nearly all supported boards now ship exclusively with EDK2 firmware. The project removed GRUB as a coreboot payload, along with the previously included MemTest86plus and CSMWrap payloads, simplifying firmware configuration and reducing maintenance. However, this change comes with an important warning for existing users. Systems configured to boot in legacy BIOS mode must be migrated to UEFI, including setting up a proper EFI System Partition, before installing the new firmware. Otherwise, existing operating system installations may no longer boot. Legacy booting is still possible, but users must add the required components themselves when compiling Libreboot. The build system now supports inserting GRUB EFI, MemTest86plus, and ReBIOS through its efi/ directory. On the hardware side, Libreboot 26.11 enables TPM 2.0 by default on several systems, including the ThinkPad X270, X280, T480, T480s, and T580, along with the Supermicro X11SSH-F and Topton X2E N150. TPM support was previously disabled due to problems with SeaBIOS, which no longer occur with EDK2. Dell Latitude laptops also receive fixes for fan control, battery status reporting, and lid-switch handling during suspend. These improvements use an updated ACPI implementation replacing older SMM-based patches. Furthermore, SD card reader functionality has been restored on the ThinkPad W541 and Dell Latitude E7240 through an EDK2 patch. For Chromebook users, the release restores configurations matching upstream MrChromebox after changes in Libreboot 26.10 caused boot failures on some systems. The Dell OptiPlex 780 also switches to EDK2, while the OptiPlex 5050 SFF gains SATA hotplug support and a fix for PCIe error reporting related to certain wireless cards. A security-related EDK2 fix addresses an ICMP packet bounds-checking vulnerability in its PXE implementation. According to the developers, Libreboot was not affected because its configurations use iPXE instead, but the patch has been incorporated into the distributed source code. Finally, the release simplifies several aspects of Libreboot’s build system, including firmware payload configuration, source handling, and ROM naming. Custom firmware images now use clearer BIOS and UEFI prefixes. Improvements to the lbmk build utility make it easier to insert additional EFI payloads and work with older firmware images. For more information, see the release announcement.

Hello Fediverse! 👋

VaeVictis OS is a hardened Debian 13 desktop (GNOME) for people leaving Windows.

Out of the box:

• closed firewall, no open ports
• full disk encryption
• sandboxed apps
• simple tools for VPN, system snapshots and NVIDIA drivers
• free guides and small tools at vaevictisos.org/learn

Honest note: it's a hobby project. The tools are written with AI and have not been independently audited. Feedback and code reviews are very welcome.

https://vaevictisos.org

#Debian #Linux #Privacy #OpenSource #introduction

Widgets don't show up in KDE Plasma on Debian Sid I am using KDE Plasma on Debian Sid. I tried to edit the desktop background to add some widgets. However, it doesn’t seem to work as no widgets are showing up in the list. I restarted the machine and yet the problem persists. I am attaching a screenshot. Any idea as to how I can deal with this? It’s not that the widgets are not there. If I click somewhere in the widgets list, then they appear on the desktop. It’s just that they don’t show up.

Random crashes on my machine Hello everyone, I have an issue with my desktop, which I really don’t understand. It is a desktop PC, with a Nvidia GPU, which I use for development (of AI, but like the image analysis part, not the slop part). I usually let it always run, and my previous machine was working fine like this. However, on this machine, I get crashes after either a few days or a few weeks. These “crashes” are weird : the machine is still up (and I can ping it), however I can’t ssh into it, I can’t connect to cockpit either, and can’t login physically on it (the display is frozen). The only way to get it back up is to forcefully shut it down, wait a little and then powr it back up; but this isn’t ideal, since it interrupts computations etc The only crashes shown in journalctl are related to irrelevant (I believe) programs : KDEConnect, DrKronqi, etc; nothing right before the crash. Do you have any idea what could cause this ? I tried logging temperatures, but nothing abnormal showed up. I ran memtest86+, nothing showed up either. Smart tells me everything is alright for my drives as well. Right now I’m thinking about changing the alimentation or the motherboard, but frankly I don’t know what’s going on and it’s really puzzling me.

What AI chatbot do you use and why? And some other AI questions cross-posted from: linux.community/post/6086432 I started using chatbots yesterday and it surprised me how complete and articulate answers are. Main topics would be apparel, sewing, cooking, finance, ETFs, taxes, house maintenance, retirement. Do you consider AI good enough to substitute human interaction? Because I remember a south park episode where randy marsh ignores his wife to interact exclusively with a bot. A parody of course but we have already plenty of AI porn and AI short stories for gullible people… and it works because they don’t stop watching (and sometimes believe it to be real). I was always kind of an anti AI guy due to privacy, to avoid LLMs monetizing my questions and because I didn’t want to be a moron who has nothing better to do than to watch AI slop, but this is a tool so pervasive and practical I’m only isolating myself if I opt out of it. Thoughts? Are there any questions you won’t ask a bot so the company behind it doesn’t monetize your input?

my memory of drawterm is fading 4 #unix_surrealism #openbsd #netbsd #plan9 #9front #glenda #unix #comic #linux

I had a journey Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)

Deepin 25.3 Adds Freeze Protection, AI Improvements, and Better Recovery The Deepin team has just released Deepin 25.3, the latest version of their China-developed, immutable Debian-based Linux distro. One of the most useful changes is a new freeze-protection mechanism that keeps core desktop components accessible if the system becomes extremely unresponsive. In other words, under heavy load, you should still be able to get to the taskbar, the app launcher, and the System Monitor to see what’s going on and kill off the offending processes. The devs have also been working on application startup performance, particularly the Control Center and the various office apps. System logs are now capped at 5GB by default and will automatically stop logging when disk space falls below 5% to prevent them from getting out of hand. On the kernel side, Deepin 25.3 upgrades the default Linux kernel to 6.6.159, with fixes for several security vulnerabilities and boot issues on certain devices. For users with more modern hardware, 6.18.56 is available via Kernel Manager. UOS AI, Deepin’s own AI assistant, can now create reminders, scheduled tasks, and recurring tasks from natural language. Moreover, it now has a whole-disk knowledge base so you can search the contents of authorized local files. There’s also a unified interface that brings MCP, Skills, and the various AI agents together. Regarding system recovery, the immutable system in Deepin now allows snapshots to be stored on local disk, USB stick, and external HDD, with the ability to restore directly from a snapshot stored at a given location. The backup and rollback process has also been tweaked to reduce the amount of additional disk space consumed during an upgrade. For the desktop, the update brings several fixes to Treeland (Deepin’s Wayland compositor), including Xwayland compatibility issues, incorrect window rendering when maximizing or going into fullscreen, and input method issues. The login screen has also been tweaked to ensure the controls are readable on light wallpapers. On the Graphics support side, the NVIDIA Container Toolkit is now preinstalled to enable GPU acceleration for Linyaps containerized applications. The installer will also be able to automatically pick an appropriate NVIDIA driver version based on the graphics hardware that it detects. Several bundled apps have received improvements as well. Image Viewer now supports cropping, rotation, annotations, mosaics, and blurring all within the viewer itself. Document Viewer now remembers your last position and layout, and Text Editor now has Markdown support. On top of that, File Manager has an expandable directory tree in the sidebar, Calendar now supports third-party schedules, and App Store has proxy configuration options as well as more accessible installation error information. Finally, Deepin 25.3 fixes several security issues in various components (Qt, curl, FFmpeg, glibc, OpenVPN, BlueZ, Xorg, and nginx), and the team has addressed some command injection, permission validation, and information disclosure issues in various system utilities. For more details, see the release announcement.

Linux’s exFAT Progs 1.4.4 Adds Optional I/O Statistics Collection for Profiling Exfatprogs (exFAT Progs) 1.4.4, exFAT filesystem userspace utilities for Linux, has been released today with several improvements, a new feature, and multiple bug fixes. Exfatprogs 1.4.4 is the fourth minor update in the Exfatprogs 1.4 series, coming three months after Exfatprogs 1.4.3. This release introduces a new feature to the exfatprogs command, namely optional I/O statistics collection for profiling read, write, discard, zero-out, and sync operations. This release also updates mkfs.exfat to increase full-format speed by using BLKZEROOUT when supported, selecting larger zeroing batches, and improving quiet and trace progress output, and reducing page-cache pollution during full formatting on systems that support POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE. Several bugs were fixed in Exfatprogs 1.4.4 for the mkfs.exfat command, avoiding memory-reservation failures when creating very large allocation bitmaps, and marking the percentage of used clusters as unknown until it is calculated. The fsck.exfat command received the most attention, with fixes to prevent arithmetic overflows and out-of-bounds reads by rejecting malformed boot sector geometry, avoid printing version information during automatic repair with the “-p” or “-a” arguments, and missing line breaks in error messages. In addition, the fsck.exfat command now stops immediately on I/O errors instead of treating them as file system inconsistencies. The dump.exfat command was updated to print complete file timestamps in raw and ISO formats, while the exfat2img command now keeps metadata image output on stdout free of status messages. Last but not least, the exfatprogs command received fixes for parsing kernel versions and boolean environment variables, and showing the correct usage text for overwrite and read-back verification options. Check out the release notes on the project’s GitHub page for more details about the changes included in exFAT Progs 1.4.4, from where you can download the source tarball if you want to compile it on your Linux distro. However, it is recommended to install Exfatprogs from your distro’s stable repositories. Exfatprogs was designed as official userspace utilities that contain all of the standard utilities for creating, fixing, and debugging exFAT filesystems in Linux distributions. The goal of the exfatprogs project is to provide Linux users with the same high performance and quality as the exFAT utilities in Windows.

The Company Behind GameOS is Building an AI Desktop OS Kirt McMaster founded Playtron in 2022, and the company went on to build GameOS, a Linux-based operating system for gaming PCs. It now goes by KORA Systems Inc. and is launching a new AI-focused desktop operating system. The OS shares the KORA name, with GameOS living inside it as GameFrame, a dedicated mode for turning the system into a game console. We received a press release regarding this weeks before the launch, so this write-up might be missing some updates. A major component of this OS is not open source. KORA, explained KORA is a desktop OS developed on a Linux base, with AI models and agents built right into the system. Don’t think that it is an app or a layer over another one; it’s a standalone offering. The company says AI workloads on macOS and Windows stay boxed into a single app or tab, with those having no view of the hardware underneath. KORA is built on the idea that AI belongs inside the OS. The desktop is organized around neural workspaces, where each one keeps a project or client apart from the rest, and the AI only sees the workspace that is open. Files in it also keep their own version history. Each workspace doubles as a sandbox too. The user sets what files, devices, AI tools, and online services every app and agent can access, while AppArmor enforces it all. Search in the neural file system works on meaning, so a person or an agent can find a file by what it contains. Its memory system builds context from the email, contacts, calendar, and cloud files the user connects. Local models run that analysis on the device, and data goes to the cloud only with the user’s approval. How open is it? Cortex is the engine behind the models, and it spreads AI work over the CPU, GPU, and NPU, then passes some of it to other computers on the network. Local models run by default, and cloud ones only join when a task needs them. KORA speculates that local models will handle roughly seven in ten of the calls it manages in 2027. They also say that models from any outside lab can be integrated, and a chat can move from its own agent to Codex or Claude Code with its context intact. A planned SDK would also let third-party apps and agents tap into projects, memory, search, and email. Sadly, Cortex is not open source. :( Still, the wider ecosystem is open, and developers will get the same building blocks KORA’s own apps use, such as workspaces, file versioning, and collaboration. You mentioned Qualcomm? Yes! Qualcomm engineers worked alongside KORA for nearly a year to bring a Linux desktop to the Snapdragon X2 Elite platform. Though Qualcomm’s wider Linux effort for X2 laptops is still early. Its own developer preview targets kernel developers and not end users, and the drivers meant to open the NPU to local AI are still being pushed upstream. Even so, KORA says the PCs can run a language model with 26 billion parameters locally, with HUMAIN, the Saudi AI company, working with KORA on an enterprise version. That version is called HUMAIN OS, with the first OEM PCs expected to arrive preloaded with it in 2027, while KORA itself follows later that year. So, yes, for now, there is no ISO to download in case you got too excited. Some thoughts If you look closely, they are going at it differently than Omarchy, which began in June 2025 as a ready-made setup of Arch Linux and Hyprland that has since landed millions in backing for its foundation. Omarchy’s Quattro release lets users pick from several third-party agents, while KORA builds its own agent into the system and lets others plug in their models. They are basically taking different routes to chase the same bet. Both seem convinced that AI agents are where the desktop market is headed.

The AI-Assisted Linux Driver for DisplayLink Gets Legal Notice Before we dive into the matter, you first have to understand what DisplayLink is. It is a proprietary graphics transport technology that lets computers connect to one or more external displays over USB, using docks or adapters built around DisplayLink chips. It works by compressing display data on the host computer and sending it to a chip in the connected device. The chip then decodes it for output to monitors through interfaces such as HDMI or DisplayPort. On Linux, this support can rub some people the wrong way due to its closed-source nature. That is where Mike Lothian’s (FireBurn) Vino comes in as an open alternative. Unfortunately, Synaptics owns DisplayLink and has sent Mike cease-and-desist letters alleging that he infringed its DisplayLink patents with his project. What’s Vino? Vino is a driver that lets the Linux kernel talk to DisplayLink docks directly. It is meant to replace DisplayLink’s closed-source software and the open source EVDI kernel module that sits beside it. Mike wrote it with help from Claude Code, and the first version reached the kernel mailing list in June, unfinished. He had faced a communication issue between the dock and the driver and asked other developers for help. In early July (courtesy of LWN.net), he emailed a Synaptics employee for guidance and mentioned his Rust rewrite of EVDI. About two weeks later, a different employee replied. That reply said his Rust rewrite of EVDI was not a thing of concern. Rather, the concern was the DisplayLink protocol and codec, which Synaptics believes are covered by its patents. Lawyers get involved A cease-and-desist letter followed on August 17. It told Mike to stop development and withdraw anything he had submitted to maintainers and hosting sites, with a signed confirmation due by August 28. An appendix listed over 125 patents without saying which applied. Mike posted a working version 3 of Vino on August 26 and asked Synaptics the next day which claims they had in mind. The answer came in October as claim charts. They map one claim from each of two patents, GB2484736 and GB2485613, to his source code. The October 5 letter said Synaptics would seek $25,000 for the cost of preparing those charts if Mike missed an October 11 deadline, with the figure rising by at least $25,000 each week. Mike replied on October 6 (message 8) with an offer to pause public work on the encoding code the charts point to if Synaptics paused the deadline and the weekly charge. He also asked about licensing that code for non-commercial use. On October 7, Synaptics said it would grant no patent license or promise not to sue and set October 18 as a final deadline. What I can see so far is a very aggressive patent infringement witch hunt against a lone open source developer who was quite open to communication. Synaptics took about three weeks to answer his request for specifics, then followed with a potentially life-ruining $25,000 demand that compounds weekly. Clean room design quirks Mike describes Vino as a clean-room driver and says he reverse engineered it from captured USB traffic and vendor programs. If you didn’t know, in a clean-room recreation, one party studies the original implementation, then writes a description, and a separate party builds the new code from that description alone. It is meant to act as a defense against copyright claims because it shows nothing was copied. Synaptics’ July reply argues that clean-room or independently written code can still infringe a patent. 🤷 The timing Vino also lands in a busy stretch for AI-assisted reverse engineering, from smart TV cleanups to office suite clones. Legal pressure has reached other AI-built projects too. Mike has already taken down the Vino repository in response to the demands, and Synaptics has not made a public statement so far. Only time will tell what happens to the work, and I hope someone forked it before it went offline, as that would give others a good starting point to build on.

pipewire combine sink help please so I create a combined sink from two audio devices, my HDMI (DP actually) monitor with OK speakers and the analog stereo audio out, which got a subwoofer attached, without satellites. pactl load-module module-combine-sink, this works swimmingly, sound is awesome, I can set exact audio levels for each output, no notes. problem is, I’m listening to an internet audio stream via Rhythmbox (tried mp3s off a network share, same deal) and when there’s heavy CPU activity, the sound slows down, goes oooOOooOooOOoo like if you remember audio tapes from the olden days that got stretched/deformed. this only happens with the combined sink, if it’s just HDMI audio, no issues. used to happen infrequently, only when launching games or android studio doing compiling but nowadays with every other site having some cloudflare/anubis-like CPU torture, it’s getting really tired, really fast. tried looking at htop, pw-top, following the journal but nothing of substance is observable; possibly because this lasts for a second or so and those tools ain’t exactly real-time. maybe the issue is the devices being 48 KHz whilst the stream is 44.1 and there’s some resampling happening? tried looking at pipewire/wireplumber documentation but that stuff is way above my head; “quantums”, wtf?! so is there some priority I can elevate or something so that this audio stack doesn’t get compromised? I don’t wanna give up the setup nor Rhythmbox. Fedora, Plasma, Wayland, i5-4670, RX 580.

Unable to create bottles with Bottles Hello. This is a long shot, but I installed openSUSE Slowroll over Tumbleweed yesterday and everything went great. However, now I’m now no longer able to create new bottles with Bottles. Bottles is installed from Flathub. Any way I try to create a new bottle it immediately fails with: (ERROR) Failed to initialize the Wine prefix. Command exited with status 1. I tried downgrading Bottles the results were much the same with the versions I tried, except the error message was: (ERROR) Wine prefix initialization failed. This is frustrating because there’s not much to go on. The process does create some folders on the SDD I’m using for my bottles, so I don’t think it’s a permission issue. I have used Flatseal to give proper access. The default bottle folder has the same result anyway. I never had this issue on my previous installation and Bottles worked fine. Bottles issue tracker has the bug #4919 which I assume is the same problem I have, except I’m completely unable to create a bottle no matter which settings I try. If anyone has any ideas I could try it would be welcome. I’d prefer using Bottles for my Wine needs.

Hi infosec.exchange 👋 Computer scientist with a soft spot for self-hosting and security. Always happy to chat about Linux, privacy, and running your own services. #Introduction #Linux #Privacy #Security #SelfHosting #HomeLab #OpenSource #InfoSec

Performance evolution of route lookup on Linux via @maytha8@mastodon.au https://lobste.rs/s/vzpcnd #linux https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-linux-performance-ipv4-ipv6-route-lookup

Over the past few days, I've been working on some Linux-based setups, bringing back some of my old solutions (with a few adaptations) to make them work the way I like. Mostly inspired by some of the ideas of simplicity that come from the BSD world. I'm using Alpine Linux as a base, and I've been testing these setups on both proper servers and SBCs, for various reasons. And, all things considered, some distributions (like Alpine, for example) have remained fairly true to the original ideas of simplicity and predictability. I still enjoy using Linux when it’s logical and predictable. And this got me thinking: some distributions have gone from: "Hey, we're a solid, simple, and reliable alternative to Windows. Give us a try!" to: "Hey, we support practically all your hardware, just like Windows" (which, to be fair, was a real achievement) to: "Hey, Windows! I’ve become just like you!" As if complexity automatically meant "enterprise-grade", and being "enterprise-grade" were something everyone should aspire to - even on a laptop or a small SBC. There's nothing wrong with solving complex problems. Some complexity is unavoidable, and sometimes even necessary. But complexity should be the price we sometimes have to pay to solve problems, not something we proudly advertise as a feature. Otherwise, we end up exactly where we started: just like Windows. Or perhaps even worse. #Linux

Modding Linux to use SIGKILL on every process https://lobste.rs/s/5wrucm #linux https://vulpinecitrus.info/blog/what-if-you-could-handle-sigkill/