Mozilla Firefox 57.0.4 and KDE Frameworks 5.41.0 landed

Jan 11, 2018 20:43 GMT  ·  By

openSUSE Project reports today through Douglas DeMaio that the openSUSE Tumbleweed software repositories have been flooded this week by four new snapshots that brought updated components and other improvements.

According to the developer, much of the efforts of the OpenSuSE Tumbleweed's maintainers were focused this week on patching the recently unearthed Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities that put billions of devices at risk of attacks by allowing unprivileged attackers to steal your sensitive data from memory.

openSUSE Tumbleweed is now patched against both Meltdown and Spectre if you use the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series, which contains patches for many of the security vulnerabilities associated with Meltdown and Spectre. However, the Tumbleweed is yet to receive a fully patched Linux 4.14 kernel against these exploits.

"While the Long-Term Support 4.4 Linux Kernel has patched many of the vulnerabilities associated with Meltdown and Spectre, the 4.14.12 Linux Kernel released in snapshot 20180107 hasn’t, but Tumbleweed users will likely see the vulnerabilities patched soon," said Douglas DeMaio in today's announcement.

Tumbleweed receives Mozilla Firefox 57.0.4 and LibreOffice 6.0 RC1

Besides the updated kernels, openSUSE Tumbleweed received the latest Mozilla Firefox 57.0.4 web browser, which is also patched against Meltdown and Spectre, and already adopted the upcoming LibreOffice 6.0 open source office suite by allowing users to use the first Release Candidate version.

Other than that, the four snapshots brought various other software updates, including KDE Frameworks 5.41.0, Poppler 0.62.0, Python 3.6.4, irssi 1.0.6, LLVM 5.0.1, kcm_sddm 5.11.5, oniguruma 6.7.0, python-setuptools 38.4.0, perl-IPC-Run 0.96, doxygen 1.8.14, Epiphany 3.26.5.1, hwdata 0.308, kernel-firmware 20180104, and icecream 1.1.

On top of that, Intel's latest microcode update for Linux is available as well in the software repositories of openSUSE Tumbleweed to address the Meltdown and Spectre bugs, so you should update your installations immediately after reading this, and keep them updated from now on at all times.