News briefs for February 21, 2019.

GNOME 3.31.91 beta was released[1] this morning. This is the second beta of the 3.32 release cycle and also the start of the string freeze. See the list of all the changes and updates here[2]. The BuildStream project snapshot is here[3], or you can get the source packages from here[4].

Cisco's Duo Security division is launching a public beta of its CRXcavator[5] tool to help discover risky Google Chrome web extensions. According to the eWeek post[6], CRXcavator "will make it easier for organizations to take inventory of the Chrome extensions running across their enterprise, understand what if any risk they pose and then link that to a policy for secure deployment. As part of the effort to build CRXcavator, Duo also looked at over 120,000 Chrome extensions, to discover potential security concerns and risks."

Fedora 30 now has a fully Flicker Free boot[7]. Hans de Goede's blog reports[8] that "Last week a new version of plymouth landed which implements the new theme for this and also includes a much improved offline-updates experience, following this design. At boot the display will seamlessly transit from the firmware boot-splash into the new plymouth theme, which uses the firmware boot-splash as background." See the post[9] for screenshots and more details.

Qt Creator 4.9 Beta was released[10] today. Improvements include generic programming language support, the QML parser was updated to Qt 5.12, the UI for diagnostics from the Clang analyzer tools has many improvements, and much more. You can get the open-source version from the Qt downloads page[11].

Four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released this week[12], bringing updates for Kerberos, GNOME, KDE, YaST and Mozilla Firefox.

Read more from our friends at Linux Journal