Heya folks! It's Friday, and that means it's time for the weekly Solus roundup!
With this sync, we are upping the Usr-Merge chance by 15%. That brings the total to 25%, meaning a full quarter of all updated Solus systems will undergo the Usr-Merge process. If you are not familiar with Usr-Merge, check out our blog post on the subject.
Now that the Usr-Merge is well underway, the team will be spending the next couple of weeks focusing on getting a new release out the door. The issues surrounding the merge kept us from putting out ISOs, and we are excited to be able to safely build them again. New ISOs are already Usr-Merged, so when they go out, users will not have to worry about it. There are still some issues that have to be fixed before we can make a release, but we're hoping to get it out sooner rather than later.
Patches to both Firefox and Thunderbird have been added to fix envvar conflicts with each other. We have to set some environmental variables in the Firefox launch script in order to make Firefox work correctly on Solus. The problem is that these environmental variables are also used by Thunderbird, since they share much of the same code, and if they're set to the values FireFox needs, it breaks Thunderbird. When you click on a link in FireFox that opens something registered to be handled by ThunderBird, like mail links or calendar invites, it opens ThunderBird as a child process of FireFox and inherits the environmental variables, breaking Thunderbird. This will no longer be an issue.
Frog Protocols for Wayland have been included in the Solus repository this week. This is a set of Wayland protocols that aims to have much more rapid development than Wayland Protocols. The Wayland Protocols project has a problem where it takes months, even years, for new protocols to land, meaning that users are still missing basic functionality unless the Desktop Environment they're using implements them as private protocols. While nothing uses this project currently, it has been included to facilitate easier desktop development.
Our Solus Cleanup Crew™️ has been hard at work this week bringing the repository up to current standards:
Most of these tasks are beginner-friendly, and can be a great way to learn Solus packaging. We invite anyone that has the time and inclination to join us!
If you would like to join:
- Join the Solus Packaging Room on Matrix
- Read and practice our packaging documentation
- Submit your first Pull Request. We recommend doing the homepage task
- Follow along the review process until your PR gets merged
- Continue on contributing!
Security updates
We have a few important security updates this week. One is from the CUPS project, fixing a remote code execution vulnerability.
The other stems from our default PAM configuration, in which the root user was set as a passwordless account, enabling people with physical access to the machine to login as root from a TTY without a password. Not all installations of Solus were affected, and a fix has already been cherry-picked to the Stable repository.
General updates
The full list of updated packages can be found here.
That’s all for this week, folks! We'll be here same time, same place next week for another roundup of the news!
Known issues
- When running eopkg check,
linux-current and linux-lts show as broken. These are false positives, and can be disregarded.
