Heya folks! We're here with another installment of the weekly Solus news!
This week. Grub has been updated to version 2.12. This brings a ton of fixes, as well as improved support for various technologies. There are a couple of things to note about Grub updates:
- Grub is only used in BIOS systems, not on EFI systems (these use systemd-boot). Run the
bootctl command to determine if you are running a grub/BIOS system. It should show 'Not booted with EFI'.
- Grub does not get automatically updated; it must be done manually if desired.
- If you have a
/boot partition, it must be mounted before doing the manual installation.
To update the Grub bootloader, run the following command after fully updating your system, replacing sdX with the drive (not the partition) that Grub is installed on. Don't hesitate to ask for help to determine your boot disk or when you encounter any errors.
sudo grub-install --boot-directory=/boot/ --target=i386-pc --recheck --force /dev/sdX
LLVM has been updated to 18.1.6. This includes updating Crystal to 1.12.1, ispc to 1.23.0, and ziglang to 0.12.0. Additionally, we are including more tools in the Rust package, and the tools have been moved into the development subpackage (rust-devel). Anyone looking to develop Rust programs can now simply install rust-devel and everything they need will be installed and ready to go.
For the 3D modelers out there, our Blender package now has CUDA and OptiX support! NVIDIA users will now be able to render their Blender projects using their GPU. This should make rendering much faster for people with supported devices.
Kernel-side changes for BCC, or the BPF Compiler Collection, have landed in Solus. BCC is a toolkit for creating efficient kernel tracing and manipulation programs, and includes several useful tools and examples. They are very powerful performance tools that inject code directly into kernel-space. BCC itself landed in the repository last week, but many of the tools didn't work until this week's kernel changes were made.
GNOME Software and KDE Discover are no longer marked as experimental as of this week. If you wish to help us test these applications, install the one you want (gnome-software or discover), and use them as you would the Software Center. There are 4 issues to track the testing process:
This is a significant milestone, and we are glad to open up testing for everyone!
Last, but certainly not least, we'd like to give a shoutout to the people that have been steadily working through the repository and adding homepages to package.yml files, doing cleanup, and adding monitoring.yml files. We started this initiative at the end of September 2023, and since then, almost 1700 packages have been cleaned up, the majority of which have been done by community contributors. This work may not be glamorous, but your efforts are greatly appreciated. Thank you all very much!
Security updates
For security updates this week, we have Grub. The jump to 2.12 means that a long list of security issues were fixed. Some web browsers have also been cherry-picked during the week for security fixes.
- grub2 was updated to 2.12-39 (@silkeh, @silkeh). Includes security fixes for CVE-2014-4607, CVE-2020-10713, CVE-2020-14308, CVE-2020-14309, CVE-2020-14310, CVE-2020-14311, CVE-2020-14372, CVE-2020-15705, CVE-2020-15706, CVE-2020-15707, CVE-2020-25632, CVE-2020-25647, CVE-2020-27749, CVE-2020-27779, CVE-2021-20225, CVE-2021-20233, CVE-2021-3418, CVE-2021-3695, CVE-2021-3696, CVE-2021-3697, CVE-2021-3981, CVE-2022-2601, CVE-2022-28733, CVE-2022-28734, CVE-2022-28735, CVE-2022-28736, CVE-2022-3775, CVE-2023-4692, CVE-2023-4693.
General updates
If you want to see the full list of changed packages, click this link.
That’s all for this week, folks! Tune in next week for more Solus news.
