Users are urged to update their installations immediately

Jan 16, 2018 20:37 GMT  ·  By

It's time for users of the Chakra GNU/Linux operating system to patch their systems against the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities as new kernel updates landed today in the repos.

Publicly disclosed earlier this month, the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities are affecting us all, but OS vendors and OEMs are trying their best to mitigate them so that no user can be the victim of attacks where their sensitive data is at risk of getting in the hands of the wrong person.

Following in the footsteps of other popular GNU/Linux distributions, Chakra GNU/Linux receives new kernel updates today that mitigates the Meltdown exploit, and partially addresses the Spectre vulnerability. Users are urged to update their systems immediately to either Linux 4.14.12 or 4.4.110 kernels.

"This is a small but important upgrade of the Linux kernels in our repositories to address the recently discovered Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities affecting Intel’s CPUs," Neofytos Kolokotronis said in today's announcement. "As of now you’ll find available updates to linux 4.14.12 and linux-lts 4.4.110 and several rebuilds of the packages that depend on them."

Nvidia 387.34 graphics driver and Intel microcode 20180108 now available

In addition to the new kernel updates, the GNU/Linux development team also pushed the latest Nvidia 387.34 proprietary graphics driver and Intel's 20180108 microcode firmware update to mitigate the Spectre security flaw for users with Intel CPUs. Besides that, PHP 7.1.13 is now available as well from Chakra's repositories.

Originally based on Arch Linux, Chakra GNU/Linux is a distro that focuses on KDE software and follows a rolling release model, just like Arch Linux, where the users install once and receive updates forever. Unlike Arch Linux, Chakra GNU/Linux users a half-rolling release to frequently distribute updates and security patches to its users.

From time to time, Chakra GNU/Linux also gets new, up-to-date installation mediums for those who want to install the Linux-based operating system on their computers without having to download hundreds of updates from the software repositories after installation. You can download the latest release right now.