After a little break, IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 157 is out! This is the largest release in size we have ever had and updates various parts of the operating system and brings an updated kernel.

Since IPFire is built from source and not based on any distribution, we get to select the best versions of open source software to be a part of it. This release is the second part of our "spring clean" release which updates various software packages and we have also dropped software that we no longer need. The vast amount of this work has been done by Adolf Belka who has been spending many nights in front of a compiler trying to make it all work. If you want to support him and the entire development team, please help us with your donation.

Deprecating Python 2

We have made huge efforts to migrate away from Python 2 which has reached its end of life on January 1st of this year. That includes repackaging third-party modules for Python 3 and migrating our own software to Python 3.

The work will continue over the next couple of weeks and we are hopeful to remove all Python 2 code with the next release. We will keep Python 2 around for a little bit longer to give everyone with custom scripts a little bit of time to migrate them away, too.

Misc.

• The IPFire kernel has been rebased on Linux 4.14.232 which brings various security and stability fixes
• Updated packages: bash 5.1.4, boost 1.76.0, cmake 3.20.2, curl 7.76.1, dejavu-fonts-ttf 2.37, expat 2.3.0, file 5.40, fuse 3.10.3, gdb 10.2, glib 2.68.1, iproute2 5.12.0, less 581.2, libaio 0.3.112, libarchive 3.5.1, libcap-ng 0.8.2, libedit 20210419-3.1, libevent2 2.1.12, libexif 0.6.22, libgcrypt 1.9.3, libgpg-error 1.42, libtiff 4.3.0, libupnp 1.14.6, libxcrypt 4.4.20, libxml2 2.9.10, lm_sensors 3.6.0, lua 5.4.3, meson 0.58.0, OpenSSH 8.6p1, perl-Canary-Stability, perl-Convert-TNET 0.18, perl-Convert-UUlib 1.8, perl-Crypt-PasswdMD5 1.41, perl-Digest 1.19, pixman 0.40.0, poppler 21.05.0 (and poppler-data 0.4.10), pppd 2.4.9, readline 8.1, sqlite 3.35.5, squid 4.15, sudo 1.9.7, wireless-regdb 2020.11.20, xfsprogs 5.11.0
• Some packages that are no longer needed for the build process have been dropped
• Peter Müller has cleaned up the web server configuration for the web user interface and removed various quirks and hacks for old software like Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
• Leo-Andres Hofmann has contributed some cosmetic changes for the live graphs
• A security vulnerability has been reported by Mücahit Saratar (#12619) where it was possible to change a script as an unprivileged user due to a file permission error which could later be executed as root. Thank you for reporting this to us.

Add-ons

• Updated packages: cifs-utils 6.13, cups 2.3.3op2, cups-filters 1.28.8, dnsdist 1.6.0, elfutils 0.184, fetchmail 6.4.19, ffmpeg 4.4, libmicrohttpd 0.9.73, mpd 0.22.6, ncat 7.91, nmap 7.91, samba 4.14.4, Tor 0.4.5.8