Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.6-rc2, released on September 17. Linus said:

I think the most notable thing about 6.6-rc2 is simply that it's exactly 32 years to the day since the 0.01 release. And that's a round number if you are a computer person.

Because other than the random date, I don't see anything that really stands out here.

Stable updates: 6.5.4, 6.1.54, 5.15.132, and 5.10.195 were released on September 19.

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Quote of the week

As you may have gathered from the MAINTAINERS patch I just sent out, I have resigned from my position at Red Hat, and will be stepping back from nouveau development.

This is a personal decision that I've been mulling over for a number of years now, and I feel that with GSP-RM greatly simplifying support of future HW, and the community being built around NVK, that things are in good hands and this is the right time for me to take some time away to explore other avenues.

— Ben Skeggs

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The Debian Project mourns the loss of Abraham Raji

The Debian project is mourning Abraham Raji, who died in an accident on September 13.

Abraham was a popular and respected Debian Developer as well a prominent free software champion in his home state of Kerala, India. He was a talented graphic designer and led design and branding work for DebConf23 and several other local events in recent years. Abraham gave his time selflessly when mentoring new contributors to the Debian project, and he was instrumental in creating and maintaining the Debian India website.

The Debian Project honors his good work and strong dedication to Debian and Free Software. Abraham’s contributions will not be forgotten, and the high standards of his work will continue to serve as an inspiration to others.

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JDK 21 released

JDK 21, the reference implementation of the Java 21 language specification, has been released. "This release includes fifteen JEPs [1], including the final versions of Record Patterns (440), Pattern Matching for switch (441), and Virtual Threads (444)".

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PostgreSQL 16 released

Version 16 of the PostgreSQL database manager has been released.

PostgreSQL 16 contains many new features and enhancements, including:

• Allow parallelization of FULL and internal right OUTER hash joins
• Allow logical replication from standby servers
• Allow logical replication subscribers to apply large transactions in parallel
• Allow monitoring of I/O statistics using the new pg_stat_io view
• Add SQL/JSON constructors and identity functions
• Improve performance of vacuum freezing
• Add support for regular expression matching of user and database names in pg_hba.conf, and user names in pg_ident.conf

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Videos from FOSSY released (Software Freedom Conservancy)

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has announced the availability of videos from the first-ever Free and Open Source Yearly (FOSSY) conference, which was held in July in Portland, Oregon in the US.

During the four days of the conference, there were a wide variety of talks from speakers with a range of experience and backgrounds, and amazing community focused discussions. Featuring wide ranging topics such as a panel discussion about software coops, what is life like without a smartphone (where the picture on the right is from), and thinking about FOSS from a systems theory perspective. Our track organizers brought together communities from all over, and led by example choosing speakers, topics and setting up panels for important conversations. There is definitely a talk that will interest you, whether you are interested in nonprofit board structure, an introduction to Reproducible Builds or maybe you are looking to have more nature adventures with free software.

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Forty years of GNU

The Free Software Foundation looks forward to the 40th anniversary of the GNU project, coming soon:

On September 27, 1983, a computer scientist named Richard Stallman announced the plan to develop a free software Unix-like operating system called GNU, for "GNU's not Unix." GNU is the only operating system developed specifically for the sake of users' freedom, and has remained true to its founding ideals for forty years.

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