Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 20/06/2023: DeVault Promising a 'Reform', Libreboot Promising No-microcode ROMs



  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Jupiter BroadcastingHam Sandwich | LINUX Unplugged 515

        Is Ham Radio a natural hobby for Linux users? An old friend joins us to explain where the two overlap. Special Guest: Noah Chelliah.

    • Kernel Space

      • Richard W.M. Jones: Follow up to “I booted Linux 292,612 times”

        Well that blew up. It was supposed to be just a silly off-the-cuff comment about how some bugs are very tedious to bisect.

        To answer a few questions people had, here’s what actually happened. As they say, don’t believe everything you read in the press.



        [...]

        At that point I thought I had the right commit, but Paolo Bonzini suggested to me that I boot the kernel in parallel, in a loop, for 24 hours at the point immediately before the commit, to try to show that there was no latent issue in the kernel before. (As it turns out while this is a good idea, this analysis is subtly flawed as we’ll see).

        So I did just that. After 21 hours I got bored (plus this is using a lot of electricity and generating huge amounts of heat, and we’re in the middle of a heatwave here in the UK). I killed the test after 292,612 successful boots.

        I had a commit that looked suspicious, but what to do now? I posted my findings on LKML.

        We still didn’t fully understand how to trigger the hang, except it was annoying and rare, seemed to happen with different frequencies on AMD and Intel, could be reproduced by several independent people, but crucially kernel developer Peter Zijlstra could not reproduce it.

    • Applications

      • Linux LinksEasy Effects – enhance your audio

        If you find your home computer setup needs an EQ, Easy Effects might just be the ticket.

        Easy Effects is GTK4 audio manipulation software which includes a range of tools. Besides an EQ, there are many other tools incorporated including a limiter, compressor, and a reverberation tool. There’s a built-in spectrum analyzer too.

        It’s free and open source software.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • DebugPointCinnamon 5.8 Desktop: Best New Features

        Feature highlights of the recently released Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment. The highly anticipated Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment was released just a few days ago.

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Write.asUnifying the KRunner sorting mechanisms for Plasma6 & further plans

          In Plasma5, we had different sorting implementations for KRunner and Kicker. This had historical reasons, because Kicker only used a subset of the available KRunner plugins. Due to the increased reliability, we decided to allow all available plugins to be loaded. However, the model still hard-coded the order in which the categories are displayed. This was reported in this bug which received numerous duplicates.

          To address this concern, I focused on refactoring and cleaning up KRunner as part of KDE Frameworks 6. Among the significant architectural changes was the integration of KRunner's model responsible for sorting into the KRunner framework itself. This integration enabled easier code sharing and simplified code maintenance. Consequently, the custom sorting logic previously present in Kicker could be removed.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Gentoo Family

      • GentooBonding period 1 – Modernization of Portage
        Bonding period 1 – Modernization of Portage

        Hello everyone,

        I am Berin Aniesh, one of the four contributors for Gentoo through GSOC 2023. You can read more about us here. In this post, I want to talk about the project I am working on and the first two€  weeks of the community bonding period

        Title and Project Scope

        The title of the project is “Modernization of portage codebase by refactoring and rewriting performance critical parts as C++ extensions”.

        Portage is probably the most versatile package manager on the planet and this has been its boon and bane at the same time This versatility combined with portage’s feature richness has made it possible for not only gentoo users, but projects like chromium OS, Flatcar container linux, a numerous downstream projects and many more. In linux, it can support any underlying stack (eg. glibc vs musl, hardened systems, systemd vs openrc, etc). Other than linux, it can also run on BSD and MacOS. It supports compile time feature selection through USE flags. Taking all these factors into€  account, together with the fact that portage supports numerous architectures, seeing portage€  perform its duties as it was designed to is a huge feat of engineering. And above all, everything of€  portage is written by passionate volunteers. If anything, understanding the landscape of gentoo has€  brought me huge respect towards the gentoo developers and the community.

      • GentooWeek 3 – Modernization of Portage
        Week 3 – Modernization of Portage

        It is the third week of the coding period. It is mostly an uneventful week. Most part was spent on€  trying to understand the dependency resolution algorithm. In the second part of the week I also did€  some refactoring and some type hints.

        Update on the blog posts

        I lost my password to access this blog and also had troubles resetting the password. That is why I€  have not been able to post per week. With help from BlueKnight, I got my access back. So, I am dumping the blog posts I have written, all at once. From next week, I expect posts to be at regular intervals (one per week). Sorry about the bulk posting, hope you don’t mind.

      • GentooWeek 1 – Modernization of Portage

        Week 1 – Modernization of Portage

        Coding period starts

        So, it’s the first week of the official coding period and I wanted to write some code and get it€  merged into the master branch (I understand it’s a bit over ambitious of me, but a man can wish).€  As I said in the first blog post, portage is relied up on by many people for different use cases and if€  something were a simple fix, the gentoo developers would have done it already. I just can’t storm in and make changes, expect things to work.

        So, we tried to find a place which has very little impact on the portage’s running and ended up at emerge --version.



      • GentooBonding Period 2 – Modernization of Portage
        Bonding Period 2 – Modernization of Portage
        Context

        In order to get familiar with the portage codebase, we decided that I’d fix a few bugs. This blog post talks about the second half of the community bonding period (weeks 3 and 4) where I try to do that.

        Bugs, bugs and more bugs

        When it comes to bugs, the paradox of choice is real. To choose from, there is a heap of them (1439 at the moment of writing). Most of the bugs are quality of life improvements as the portage team€  has put in a lot of effort to make sure portage does it’s jobs without many errors. After searching, we decided to work on bug 634576.

      • GentooWeek 2 – Modernization of Portage
        Week 2 – Modernization of Portage

        It is the second week of coding period and it has been a productive one. It started according to the€  plans and diverged in the second half for the good. The first half was towards type annotation and the second half was dummy_threading deprecation.

        Type annotation

        In the words of Sam, my mentor, “I’d considere a GSOC project complete if some 50% of the€  codebase is just type annotated”. Many portage developers were excited when we were talking€  about adding type hints and docstrings.

        Adding type hints and tidying up the codebase will also give me more exposure to the underlying functions. So, we decided, this week I’ll do type annotations.

        Deciding on the type hints style

        Python 3.9 adds a simpler “native” style type annotation, but portage has a minimum supported python version of 3.7.

      • GentooWeek 3 report on porting Gentoo packages to modern C

        Hello all,

        I’m here with my week 3 report for Modern C porting of Gentoo’s
        packages. For this week I diverted from my initial idea a bit and
        focused on the “C++17 does not allow register storage class specific” type
        error. Basically, C++14 deprecated the register storage class and it has
        been completely removed in C++17, thus resulting in C++ packages that
        use register keywords with this kind of error. A general fix is it
        either removes the keywords or replaces them with *int* where applicable.

        For example, in this PR [1] for the fox toolkit, I’m using sed to remove
        register keywords from various folders of the source. Whenever possible
        I’m sending patches upstream as well, for example, I’ve sent this [2]
        patch upstream while also applying it Gentoo tree.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Red HatDebugging in GDB: Create custom stack winders

        In this article, we will walk through the process of creating a custom stack unwinder for the GNU Project Debugger (GDB) using GDB's Python API. We'll first explore when writing such an unwinder might be necessary, then create a small example application that demonstrates a need for a custom unwinder before finally writing a custom unwinder for our application inside the debugger.

        By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to use our custom stack unwinder to allow GDB to create a full backtrace for our application.

        What is an unwinder?

        An unwinder is how GDB figures out the call stack of an inferior, for example, GDB's backtrace command: [...]

      • Red HatMy advice for designing features for the hybrid cloud

        Hybrid clouds are mixed computing environments that allow applications to use a combination of compute, networking, storage, and services in public clouds and private clouds, including clouds running on-premise or at a plethora of edge locations.

        To accomplish this, hybrid cloud platforms must be designed to expose the best of the public clouds they support and present the advantages of private clouds while presenting a cohesive interface to the application developer—and preferably the cloud admin, too. A cloud admin can install a cloud instance called a cluster, consisting of a control plane (at least one instance) to manage the cluster and multiple compute instances that run applications on them.

        In the rest of this article, "developer" specifically refers to a hybrid cloud platform developer, not an application developer.€  As a developer working on OpenShift, Red Hat’s hybrid cloud platform, I have found that designing features around a few key tenets ensures the cohesiveness that hybrid cloud platforms wish to achieve.

      • Red HatFine-tune large language models using OpenShift Data Science

        As an Ansible Lightspeed engineer, my team works on the cloud service that interacts with Watson Code Assistant large language models for Ansible task generation. Curious to learn more about the mechanics of training such a model, I set out to create my own, very basic Ansible tasks model. I decided to do this using Red Hat OpenShift Data Science, which made it easy to configure and launch an environment pre-configured with everything I needed to train my model. I’ll walk through the steps I took here.

    • Debian Family

      • Microsoft shill C.J. Collier: First taste of Debian 12

        As some of you may know, the Debian project released v12, bookworm to stable on the 10th of this month. I haven’t had a reason to try it yet, but I’m downloading it now. My first thought is that it’s much larger than I expected. The normal sized version used to fit on a CD-ROM disk, so around 650MB. The netinst has until now been even smaller, with the most recent versions being about 256MB if I recall correctly. The netinst, now with proprietary firmware, weighs in over 700MB: [...]

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • 9to5LinuxLinux Mint 21.2 Beta Is Now Available for Download with Cinnamon 5.8

        Dubbed “Victoria”, Linux Mint 21.2 is the third installment in the Linux Mint 21 series, which is based on Canonical’s long-term supported Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series and powered by Linux kernel 5.15 LTS.

        Linux Mint 21.2 Beta is available in three editions with the Cinnamon 5.8, Xfce 4.18, and MATE 1.26 desktop environments preinstalled. As expected, the Cinnamon edition remains the flagship and it brings the most interesting changes and new features.

      • OMG UbuntuUbuntu 22.04 Fixes Window Snapping Memory Bug

        >Users of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS who make use of window snapping to enhance their productivity will be interested in a bug fixes coming down the update pipes shortly.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Linux GizmosRockchip-based SBC runs on Android 12

        As shown above, the carrier board includes a Mini PCIe socket with a Nano SIM card port enabling the use of a 4G LTE modem for cellular connectivity.

        The HDMI 2.1 port offers support for up to 8K resolution at 60 frames per second (8Kp60). On the other hand, the MIPI DSI interface provides support for up to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second (4Kp60) through a 26-pin header. For audio, the SBC features a 3.5mm audio jack and supports 8-channel audio output via HDMI.

        The Software section located on the Idea3588S product page indicates that Boardcon will provide software support for Android 12 (i.e. Kernel, Drivers, Debug tools, etc.).

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Tom's HardwareRaspberry Pi Two-Wheeled Bot Self-Balances Using AI

        Luwu Dynamics is working on a Raspberry Pi CM4-powered robot that uses two wheels to locomote capable of self-balancing.

      • HackadayA Simple Guide To Bit Banged I2C On The 6502

        We covered [Anders Nielsen]’s 65duino project a short while ago, and now he’s back with an update video showing some more details of bit-banging I2C using plain old 6502 assembly language.

      • HackadayMarvin Minsky’s 2500 Logo Computer

        [Prof. Marvin Minsky] is a very well-known figure in the field of computing, having co-founded the MIT AI lab, published extensively on AI and computational intelligence, and, let’s not forget, inventing the confocal microscope and, of course, the useless machine. But did you know he also was a co-developer of the first Logo “turtle,” and developed a computer intended to run Logo applications in an educational environment? After dredging some PDP-10 tapes owned by the MIT Media Lab, the original schematics for his machine, the Turtle Terminal TT2500 (a reference to the target price of $2500, in 1970 terms), are now available for you to examine.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Gaël Duval: Declaration of Duties of Man and Citizen.

      Let's work together for a better world? Introducing the Declaration of Duties of Man and Citizen, a complementary document to the Declaration of Human Rights, emphasizing our responsibilities and obligations. >

    • Drew DeVault Reforming the free software message



      Several weeks ago, I wrote The Free Software Foundation is dying, wherein I enumerated a number of problems with the Free Software Foundation. Some of my criticisms focused on the message: fsf.org and gnu.org together suffer from no small degree of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility which makes it difficult for new participants to learn about the movement and apply it in practice to their own projects.

      This is something which is relatively easily fixed! I have a background in writing documentation and a thorough understanding of free software philosophy and practice. Enter writefreesoftware.org: a comprehensive introduction to free software philosophy and implementation.

    • LWNDeVault: Reforming the free software message

      Drew DeVault has announced the launch of a new web site that is intended to be a better introduction to the free-software community.

    • LibreBootLibreboot – No-microcode ROMs available in next Libreboot release (new stable release soon!)
    • Medevel10 Open-source Free-to-use Telegram Bots For Developers

      As of January 2021, Telegram has more than 500 million active users worldwide. It is an instant messaging app that is widely used due to its various features. These include the ability to create bots, which are programs that can carry out various tasks within the Telegram app.

      What are

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Mozilla

        • Five ways we can make LibreOffice and Thunderbird work better together

          LibreOffice doesn’t include an email program, but there are many excellent free and open source software clients that work well alongside it. One prominent example is Mozilla Thunderbird – a sister project to the Firefox web browser.

          We know that many people use LibreOffice and Thunderbird as part of their daily workflows – so how can we make them work better together? We reached out on social media to hear from our users – on Mastodon and Twitter (and the Thunderbird project posted on their Mastodon and Twitter accounts too).

    • Programming/Development

      • HackadayToo Much Git? Try Gitless

        Git has been a powerful tool for software development and version control since the mid ’00s, gaining widespread popularity since then. Originally built by none other than Linus Torvalds for handling Linux kernel development, it’s branched out for use with all kinds of other projects. That being said, it is not the easiest thing to learn how to use, with tons of options, abstract ideas, and non-linear workflows to keep track of. So if you’re new to the system or don’t need all of its vast swath of features, you might want to try out an alternative like Gitless.

      • Dirk EddelbuettelDirk Eddelbuettel: spdl 0.0.5 on CRAN: Small Extension

        Another quick update to the still somewhat new package spdl is now om CRAN, and will go to Debian soon too. The key focus of spdl is to offer the exact same interface to logging from both R and C++ by relying on spdlog via my RcppSpdlog package. Usage examples are shown on the RcppSpdlog docs

        This release add support for the wrappers init() and log() wrapping the existing setup() function but requiring only the level argument. This requires version 0.0.13 of RcppSpdlog which was released to CRAN yesterday.

  • Leftovers



Recent Techrights' Posts

Links 16/06/2026: UK to Restrict Access to Social Control Media; The FCC Wants to Eliminate Burner Phones
Links for the day
Microsoft May Already Be Shutting Down More Gaming Studios
the writings are on the wall: XBox is in disarray.
 
OECD Carries Water for Microsoft, Targets Schools and Children With Slop Agenda
Peel off a layer or two to find GAFAM
Microsoft "Xbox braces for sweeping studio closures before June 30."
Microsoft's control of the damage-limiting narrative has clearly slipped
In Africa's Largest Nation Windows Has Fallen From 100% to a Lot Less, Now All-Time Lows
Let's see what happens or will happen in Algeria in 2027
Richard Stallman's Talk Due in One Hour, Here's What People Say
To Stallman, what matters is control by users and collective control
SLAPP Censorship - Part 108 Out of 200: Moving On and Moving Up
an explanation of our rich history and commitment to courageous whistleblowers
Why We Call Him Dr. Stallman
He got at least 15 such titles
United States of America: GNU/Linux Hovering Around 5% (It Started There)
GNU/Linux is turning 43 this year (in a few months), Linux will turn 35
Microsoft Promises Made to be Broken
It's a real problem and it is not limited to XBox
IBM Down $61 in Two Weeks, The Lies About Quantum Computers Didn't Last Long
IBM is an unsafe employer, not a good place to work
You Probably Don't Want to "Go Viral" in Toxic Social Control Media
Good news sites do not strive to go "viral" but to be consistently good, irrespective of "traffic"
New 'Article' in The Register MS Has Mentioned "AI" 44 Times. The Register MS Got Paid to Publish It.
Bear this in mind when seeing "hey hi" all over the news
18-Year Anniversary of Our IRC Community
As noted some months ago, trolling and abuse in our IRC network is very rare these days
Microsoft - Like IBM - is Leaving a Legacy is Emptied/Abandoned Buildings
Microsoft's LinkedIn had many layoffs recently
Richard Stallman's (RMS) Speaking Tour in Europe Coincides With Abandonment of Microsoft Windows
The message applies to all governments
Gemini Links 16/06/2026: Nazi Law of Mental Abuse and Lewis Aburrow's 3D-Printed Slider
Links for the day
Links 16/06/2026: Windows TCO and Fedora Finding Serious 20-Year-Old Holes in Microsoft Outlook
Links for the day
European Patent Office (EPO) Series: An Advisor to the President
he had recently advanced to membership of the "inner circle" of Team Campinos.
Two Weeks Ahead of July Three Studios Microsoft Plans to Shut Down Already Named
This is what happens when companies try to establish themselves on a mountain of promises and false assumptions, kicking the can down the road until payroll becomes hard to complete
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 15, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, June 15, 2026
IBM Works for Microsoft
Hours ago in IBM.com
European Patent Office (EPO) Series: The EPO's Brussels Liaison Officer
It would appear that in January 2020, Pellegrino was induced by Campinos to jump ship from the EUIPO and take up his current position as Brussels Liaison Officer for the EPO
European Patent Office (EPO) Receiving Section (RS) and Elimination of Many Roles
Open letter to Mr Rowan (VP1) and Mr Aledo Lopez (COO) [...] Does the EU leadership intend to tolerate this?
Microsoft's XBox is Disintegrating, Executives Are Quitting
We're basically witnessing the slow-motion "end of XBox"
Gemini Links 15/06/2026: Slop Code Benchmarked, Wireguard on NixOS and Guix
Links for the day
Links 15/06/2026: More Own Goals for the Slop Industry, Palantir Trouble in UK
Links for the day
Apple Wants Everybody to Forget About "Vision Pro" Because It Was a Giant Flop
worthless gadgets with no obvious use case/s
The Cyber Show is Adopting 'Book Form' (or Long Form Publications)
Andy and Helen nowadays invest more time in making their site faster
Richard Stallman's Software Freedom/Digital Sovereignty Tour in Europe
As things stand at present, the vast majority of people have their interactions controlled/policed by GAFAM
Estimates of Scale of Microsoft Layoffs, Will Likely Happen "in Batches"
"Heard 10 to 15 percent eventually but idk date."
IBM Has Put Red Hat on a Poor Diet of Slop, Now Fedora and Red Hat Suffocate or Choke on It
Over the weekend we saw more people leaving the company
Estimates of Microsoft Layoffs: 3,000 Staff to be Culled Just in Gaming, How Many in Other Divisions?
Now the XBox division has its own "fall guy", but it is a woman
Straw Man Arguments Against Rust
If anything, it teaches the importance of auditing packages
Tesla Debt Rose Sharply, Sales Declined, Wall Street's Claim of Tesla "Value" is Merely a Fairytale (and Not Just Tesla)
We would gladly sell land on Mars to anyone who honestly believes a company that loses money is somehow "worth" trillions in Wall Street
Stop Calling Losses "Investment"
XBox is losing money, it is a sinkhole
For Justice We Need More Speech, Not Less Speech
When you attack something you are just giving that something a bigger platform
SLAPP Censorship - Part 107 Out of 200: Keeping Law Accessible to Everybody
We'll have stories related to this in the future
Links 15/06/2026: Slop "Beg Bounties", Wall Street Fakes 'Worth', and Arkansans Saved PBS
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/06/2026: Dating Oaks, Simulation, and Theremin
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 14, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, June 14, 2026
Links 14/06/2026: Energy Cost and Reality Strikes at Heart of Slop Bubble, 75 Data Center Build-outs "Successfully Blocked"
Links for the day
Microsoft CEO Says XBox is Not a Sustainable Business
"Now, we have to turn this into a sustainable business," he said about XBox
MElon (MUSK, Elon) is a Trillionaire Like Penguins Are Mammals
Have media outlets told the truth?
Unlikely Heroes
One personal hero who is not alive (anymore) is Navalny
Bruce Schneier Was Probably Wrong About Slop
Right now politicians who openly speak in favour of slop are committing "political suicide"
SLAPP Censorship - Part 106 Out of 200: 100 Kilograms of Legal Papers
When one party's communications and filings weigh at about 3 KG of paper and another's... at about 100 KG of paper
Links 14/06/2026: More Google Layoffs, Wall Street Deems Companies That Lose Money "Worth" Trillions
Links for the day
Gemini Links 14/06/2026: "The Universe is a Hologram", "Matrix Brain Download", and "Happy 0th Year"
Links for the day
European Patent Office (EPO) Series: Battistelli's "Baltic Crusader"
Gilles Requena, Battistelli's erstwhile "Baltic Crusader" and the loyal servant of his successor Campinos
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 13, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, June 13, 2026