/// 3 Nov 2026, 4:42 am ////// Tecmint ///
Downloading files on a server without a browser can get messy when you need to resume a broken ISO download,
The post How to Download Files from the Command Line in Linux Using Wget first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides./// 3 Nov 2026, 5:20 am ////// Linux Links ///
GNOME Network Displays casts your Linux desktop to Miracast and Chromecast receivers, with audio streaming and virtual display support.
The post GNOME Network Displays – cast your desktop to wireless displays appeared first on LinuxLinks.
/// 2 Nov 2026, 11:03 pm ////// 9to5Linux ///
GIMP 3.2.8 open-source image editor is now available for download with Offset as a non-destructive filter, DPI information when copying an image to clipboard, and other changes.
The post GIMP 3.2.8 Image Editor Restores Support for Offset as a Non-Destructive Filter appeared first on 9to5Linux - do not reproduce this article without permission. This RSS feed is intended for readers, not scrapers.
/// 3 Nov 2026, 4:55 am ////// Reddit ///
I wanted one place to see everything out of date on my Fedora machine, and to know which updates might break it before I hit install. So I made Rivet.
It's a GNOME app (GTK4 with a WebKitGTK view, Python backend) that lists pending updates from dnf, Flatpak, npm globals, pipx and uv tools, cargo binaries and GNOME extensions. Each one gets a short note in plain words. Kernel updates that need the NVIDIA akmod rebuilt, DKMS modules, COPR and nightly packages, and updates to running services get flagged. The rest you can run with "Update the safe ones".
If there's a Home Assistant on your network it shows add-on and integration updates too, and lets you remove add-ons nothing uses.
When an update fails, a Fix it button runs a locked down Claude Code pass that reads the logs, retries once, restarts what needs restarting, and writes the result into the row. All the Claude stuff is of course optional, and only would use your own subscription.
I thought about container image updates as well but held off for now. If that's itneresting let me know
It has five looks and a constructivist beaver icon. It ships as a COPR RPM, MIT licensed.
sudo dnf copr enable scottnelson/rivet-updater && sudo dnf install rivet-updater
Built with help from Claude. I've used it daily on my own Fedora box for months, but the newer parts (Other software, Home Assistant, Fix it) are a few weeks old and mostly covered by an automated scenario suite so far. https://github.com/NelsonScott/rivet
[link] [comments]
/// 3 Nov 2026, 5:34 am ////// The Hacker News ///
For decades, the Linux virtual console has relied on the kernel fbcon driver, to draw the framebuffer, to manage fonts, and to handle keyboard layout. Starting with Fedora 45, we’re switching to a userspace utility called kmscon. Depending on your usage of virtual console, this may impact your workflow.
If you’re not a developer or a system administrator, chances you probably never heard about fbcon or virtual terminal (VT), in this case you’re probably not impacted.
You can still read the rest if you’re curious about minimal text interfaces, and maybe you’ll start using it.
How to use the virtual console
Most of the graphic sessions runs in tty1 or tty2. So press Ctrl+Alt+F3 to switch to tty3, and you will get a login prompt. This is the virtual console we’re talking about. To go back to your graphic session, press Ctrl+Alt+F1 (or F2 or F7 depending on your desktop environment).
Why is kmscon replacing fbcon ?
The legacy fbcon driver runs directly in the kernel space, and has significant drawbacks:
- Security: Each bug in fbcon can be exploited in the kernel directly, and each crash is a kernel panic.
- Keyboard layout: The keyboard layouts supported by the kernel are different from what userspace is using. So when you choose the keyboard layout in the anaconda installer, it tries to find the kernel layout that is as close as possible to the chosen layout.
- Fonts: fbcon only uses bitmap fonts, which look small on a High DPI display, and you can’t resize them at runtime. They have limited unicode support. Kmscon can use freetype, and render all monospace fonts.
- Scrolling: fbcon does not support scrolling anymore, due to a CVE.
- Mouse: fbcon does not have mouse support, it can be added with gpm, but is a bit clumsy. Kmscon uses a transparent hardware cursor when available, and has basic mouse support.
- Fbdev: fbcon relies on the old fbdev interface, but all GPU drivers are now using drm. Switching to kmscon allows dropping the fbdev emulation layer in the kernel.
What this will change for users and administrators ?
- Kmscon uses pseudo-tty (pts) devices. So when you run tty it returns /dev/pts/0 instead of /dev/tty1, like when you use a graphic terminal. So you will need to update all scripts or configuration that use this information.
- Kmscon uses the exclusive drm interface to the GPU to draw the terminal. If you want to run a graphic session or a program that wants to use the GPU, it won’t work like it used to with fbcon. The reason is that fbcon runs in the kernel and can let any userspace application take the GPU. Kmscon can’t do that, so you have to tell it to release the GPU. This is done with a script called kmscon-launch-gui. For example, to start a graphic session you can run
kmscon-launch-gui kmscube -c 100
or
kmscon-launch-gui startx - Kernel messages: By default the kernel error/warning messages are visible in tty1. It can be annoying when it mixes with what you are typing. You can read the messages with dmesg -w, or have a dedicated tty that runs
kmscon --vt=%I --no-switchvt --oneshot --login -- dmesg -w - Kernel fonts: The setfont command has no effect on kmscon. Kmscon uses the built-in unifont or freetype if it’s available. You can read below how to configure it. kmscon can also use psf fonts, if you want the exact same looking as fbcon.
- Keyboard layout: The loadkeys command has no effect on kmscon. Instead, kmscon listens to localectl dbus, and updates the keyboard layout accordingly. So, to change layout, run
localectl set-keymap us - Kmscon replaces the default console in F45, for tty1-6. If you want to keep a tty using fbcon, just in case, you can run
sudo systemctl mask kmsconvt@tty5 && sudo systemctl enable --now getty@tty5
Then pressing Ctrl+Alt+F5 switches to your good old fbcon console.
Default kmscon shortcuts
- Zoom in: Ctrl++, Ctrl+WheelUp
- Zoom out: Ctr+-, Ctl+WheelDown
- Rotate the terminal: Super++, Super+-
- Scroll up: Shift+UpArrow, Shift+PageUp, Mouse Wheel Up
- Scroll down: Shift+DownArrow, Shift+PageDown, Mouse Wheel Down
- Copy/paste: select with the mouse, or select a word with double click, and MiddleClick to paste
- Switch to ttyX: Ctrl+Alt+FX
- Restart kmscon on ttyX: sudo systemctl restart kmsconvt@ttyX
- To know on which VT you are using, echo $XDG_VTNR
How does it look ?
Previous experience, Fedora 45 with fbcon:
Fedora 45 with kmscon (unifont)
Fedora 45 with kmscon (freetype) and some customization (fish, Hack Nerd Font)
How to configure kmscon the way you like
Plugins
kmscon is split into multiple subpackages, so you have a minimal installation without graphic/font dependencies for servers, and optional packages for more features.
- kmscon: main package, contains the unifont font, for good unicode support without additional dependencies.
- kmscon-freetype: Use the freetype library to render the fonts.
- kmscon-pango: Uses the pango library to render the fonts, it is deprecated in favor of kmscon-freetype.
- kmscon-gl: This is an opengl renderer. This might be faster but also a bit blurry. You need to add hwaccel to your configuration file to actually use it.
Configuration file
The configuration file for kmscon is /etc/kmscon/kmscon.conf
you can copy the example with this command:
sudo cp /etc/kmscon/kmscon.conf.example /etc/kmscon/kmscon.conf
Here are the most common options to change:
verbose: enable more logs, if you have issues with kmscon. To get the logs, use
journalctl -u kmsconvt*
font-engine: defaults to freetype (if available) or unifont (fallback). You can also use pango, or psf (the format used by the kernel fonts)
font-name: The name of the font (for pango, freetype, and psf). As kmscon runs as root, the font must be installed in /usr/share/fonts, not in your home directory. You can find the exact name to use with fc-list. You can install Cascadia fonts, that are good for non-latin languages with
sudo dnf install cascadia-fonts-all
If you want fancy icons, Nerd fonts are good, but not available in the default Fedora repository. For psf font, font-name is the path to the font file.
font-size: The font height in pixels. By default kmscon tries to scale the font to have about 120×40 characters.
multi-monitor: multi-monitor configuration, the terminal is the same on all monitor. The default is scaled which will scale the font to avoid too much black border. Other options are clone, which will center the terminal on each monitor, and largest which will only use the largest monitor.
dpms-timeout: The timeout (in second) after which the monitor will be turned off. default to 600 (10 minutes). 0 means disabled.
no-mouse: This disable the mouse support. It can be useful to disable touchpad on some laptops.
palette: Change the default color palette for your terminal. You can define each color if none of the provided default palette suits you.
Conclusion
We hope you will enjoy using kmscon in Fedora 45. You may use it occasionally, or use it as your main session for some specific usage, like Veronica Explains for a writerdeck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7vFdy4BEAY.
If you encounter any bugs, have feature ideas, or want to contribute to development, the upstream repository is at https://github.com/kmscon/kmscon.
/// 2 Nov 2026, 5:04 am ////// Slashdot ///
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
/// 2 Nov 2026, 5:52 pm ////// ITS FOSS ///
Yet another new Linux distribution has landed on Arch Linux as its foundation of choice. This one is called Pond, and it is Butterfly Interaction Inc.'s vision of how a desktop should look and behave.
For its desktop interface, it uses Niri, a very popular Wayland compositor that is known for its scrollable tiling, where app windows sit in columns along an endless strip that gradually grows as new items are added.
Pond is labeled an Early Preview, and this First Look piece covers what it offers, my time using it, and the ways you can install it.
Pond: The details ✨
Butterfly says Pond mixes new ideas with desktop habits people already know, and the goal is for a computer to feel more natural to use.
It builds that around four ideas. Windows are arranged spatially and can be rearranged, components come in different sizes to fit the space available, useful information stays in one uniform place, and content only shows up when it is relevant.
They also point out that each component was planned with the whole desktop in mind, from its proportions to where it sits and how it behaves.
As I pointed out earlier, Pond is a rolling-release distro based on Arch Linux with Niri as its compositor. Package duties are handled by a package manager that picks a default source for each app across Pacman, Nix, and Flatpak. More on that later.
Getting it to run
I tested Pond inside a QEMU virtual machine with 4 GB of RAM and a 50 GB disk, making a few tweaks to the machine settings before I could get it to boot.
Right away, the installer caught my eye. It follows a very different approach than what most distros ship with, featuring a simplified one that takes users through the steps quickly.
It asks for your keyboard, language, and timezone first, then the disk, and finally a username, password, and computer name. I really liked how entering passwords in the text field showed me some Pond-themed icons instead of the usual dots or asterisks.
The login screen follows a different approach too, with a cool-looking square and line-shaped password entry box that filled up the empty small squares as I typed my password.
The desktop
Log in, and you will see that the navigation on Pond is keyboard-focused, with an onboarding flow explaining which keybindings are must-knows for getting around Pond's interface and any installed apps.
The desktop itself features a sidebar menu that houses the clock and calendar, the currently running apps inside the minimap (the squarish-looking box), and notifications from the system, web browsers, or the package manager.
A small dock-style menu sits below it, housing quick access to the network and volume controls, as well as the settings page and the hide sidebar button.
Then there's the Vicinae-based launcher, which will feel familiar if you have used launchers on any Hyprland-equipped distro like CachyOS and Omarchy.
Installing apps
Installing new apps is easy. You open the launcher using Super+Space and go into "Install apps" to see a long list of apps that work on Pond. Select one, authenticate the action with your account password, and wait for it to finish installing.
While that happens, a banner shows up in the sidebar under notifications, showing you the progress of installation. To test this out, I installed Firefox, and it ran well. Pond served me the latest build at the time of writing, Firefox 159, and it ran without any hiccups.
Pond's package manager handles those installs, and its GitHub repo shows that most of the catalog is Flatpak apps, with the rest coming from pacman and the AUR.
Those pacman and AUR apps are installed through paru, and updates run paru and Flatpak together. Nix, while present, plays a smaller part, mostly being used to facilitate GPU support.
You also have the option to install package managers like yay and npm.
Tile away!
Window tiling is the best part of Pond. I could move around app windows using Super + Left or Right, switch workspaces using key combinations like Super + Up or Down, and change window sizes using Super + Plus or Minus.
The minimap below the calendar shows each workspace as a row, with the apps inside it as icons. I could even drag and drop app windows inside it to move them across workspaces.
Verdict 📝
The distro follows a very different design language than other Linux distros, relying on colorful shapes and palettes while offering a known, reliable base to work off of.
It is still an early preview, but if development continues and people take a liking to it, I don't see why it couldn't be counted among the top-rated new blood Linux distros alongside the likes of Bazzite, Omarchy, and Nobara.
Trying Pond 📥
Pond lists two installation routes on its install page, and downloading either one means agreeing to Butterfly's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. If you are someone who doesn't like doing so, I suggest going through the fine print before committing to an install.
The first method would have you download an ISO of about 1.5 GB. Then you either flash it onto a USB stick and boot, or plop it into GNOME Boxes or Virtual Machine Manager to run it in a virtual machine.
The second method skips the flashing, letting you run an installer on Windows, where you pick a drive, set aside space for Pond, and set up dual boot.
Butterfly says the installer carries over supported Windows settings and handles common dual-boot problems such as clock mismatches and NTFS drives that block shrinking.
You will find the source code for Pond's various components on GitHub.
/// 2 Nov 2026, 3:02 pm ////// GamingOnLinux ///
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.
/// 30 Oct 2026, 7:37 pm ////// Linux Magazine ///
Even before a bug received its CVE identifier or an upstream fix, the local privilege escalation vulnerability exploit found its way into the wild.