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

Sophie Brun, Raphael Hertzog & Debian sexual conflicts of interest
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Instant Bluewashing at Confluent: Mass Layoffs Alleged at IBM
So the main question is, did IBM just fire 800 people?
 
Gemini Links 18/03/2026: Librarians, Phone Anxiety, Growing 'Small' Net, and Slop Versus Software Engineering
Links for the day
Estimates That IBM to Lay Off Close to 10,000 Workers in 2026 (Not Counting People Pushed Out)
There's still chatter about Confluent mass layoffs
Smug Threat by Garrett to Put My Family and I in Prison Doesn't Prove We Did Anything Wrong, It Only Proves He's Truly Desperate to Stop Further Publications That Embarrass Him
his reputation is poor in the United States
systemd Increasingly Microsoft Project, Controlled by Microsoft and Slopware
Cannot allow choice
What IBM Meant to Red Hat: "Proprietary Bundling, Restricted Source Access"
Anyone or anything that joins IBM likely shortens its lifespan
IBM Thrashing Confluent Upon Arrival, Based on Rumours
We deem it a bigger issue that investigative journalism perished, not that one must rely on hearsay online or mere "rumours"
Slop Is Plagiarism, Not (Vibe) Coding, and It's Not Automated, It Doesn't Save Money
Reject misnomers, explain what's actually happening
UPC is Still Illegal and Unconstitutional (Kangaroo Court for Patents, Manned by Corporate Staff), Federal Court of Justice of Germany Receives Belated Complaint About It
What is happening to Europe???
EPO Demonstration Happening Right Now, Later This Week Things Will Only Escalate Further
The SUEPO The Hague Committee wrote to staff this morning
Links 18/03/2026: Commodore's Hedley Davis Dies, Apple Not Good Enough, Cheeto "Floats Treason Charges for Iran War Coverage"
Links for the day
A Step Close to Shutting Down the European Patent Office (EPO)
Not going to work all month long
EPO Staff Demonstration Today
The demonstration will be live-streamed for those thousands of colleagues who don't live in Munich
Gemini Links 18/03/2026: Brazilian SYN Attacks and BGP
Links for the day
LibreLocal Also Coming to Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, and Spain
It helps raise awareness of Software Freedom
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 17, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 14 Out of 200: Men Who Strangle Women (and Worse) Trying to Force Us to Write Public Apologies to These Men
For those who never before saw a SLAPP, they basically make many demands
"Vibe-forking" and Why It'll Ultimately Fail (Hype on Top of Hype)
Code made with LLMs sucks; converting solid, human-tested code into slop only complicates matters and increases risk
Updates About Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation
After all those years (a decade) and in spite of phony scandals many people out there still respect him
LLM Slop With "Linux" in the Domain Names
This is becoming a pain and a problem also in the arts and in software engineering
The EFF Has a Bug, Fixing This Bug is Likely Not Possible Anymore
"the EFF's continued existence impairs the arrival of a replacement organization, one which will actually champion digital rights."
Links 17/03/2026: Microsoft Windows Broken by Samsung, Afghanistan-Pakistan War Escalation
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/03/2026: Newcomers and False-Positive 'Slop'
Links for the day
Héctor Orón Martínez & Debian shadow candidate pressure on Sruthi Chandran
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 17/03/2026: American Fentanylware (TikTok) Investors Implicated in Kickbacks, "Big Oil Knew It Was Wrecking Louisiana’s Coast"
Links for the day
For Third Time in a Week The Register MS Runs Google SPAM That Paints Google as an Ally of Women (Which is False, They're Womanisers)
What does that make The Register MS to women?
British Justice Minister Sarah Sackman Blasts Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
The "legal industry" is due for "some reckoning"
GAFAM Deprecating Old Videos ("Content") by Removing the Support for Their Format for No Good Reason
"Security" is not a valid excuse
Credit/Debit Cards Have Long Been Called Plastics, Over Time They're Becoming More Like Pure Plastics
They cost less than a dollar to manufacture
The European Patent Office (EPO) Holds a Public Demonstration Tomorrow and It'll be Live-streamed
The EPO's workforce was meant to be capable of speaking many languages and have extensive experience in the sciences
People Who Attacked Techrights Also Attacked My Mother
Picking on old ladies because you don't like Free software advocates is never OK
Little Community Element Left in CentOS
CentOS, unlike Fedora, was meant to be long supported and solid
Social Control Media is Cancel Culture (Companies Like Facebook Also Punish/Ban Accounts for Mentioning "Linux" and Lobby for Anti-Linux Legislation)
The masters of Social Control Media decide what ideas can and cannot be expressed
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 16, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, March 16, 2026
Someone at Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is Censoring the Birthday Greetings to Richard Stallman
Some people remember
The European Patent Office (EPO) Illegally Transitioning Into 'Gig' 'Economy' Equivalent (a Shop for Patent Monopolies in Europe)
for scabs aka SEALs
At Least Six EPO Strikes Next Month (Yes, Six!)
The pressure intensifies over time
Several MPs Blast Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) for Inaction and Ineffective Action This Week
"Four MPs have written to the SRA"
Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 14 Out of 200: The Abusive Cases of the Serial Strangler From Microsoft and His Litigation Buddy Garrett Did Cause "Serious Harm"
claims were de facto abandoned at the trial
Today's Discussions About How IBM Pushes Workers Out
The corporate media keeps trying - baselessly and in vain - to paint everything that happens with the "hey hi" brush
Linux Teck (linuxteck.com) and Ubuntu PIT (ubuntupit.com) Are Botspam
now they just keep experimenting by trashing their sites and reputation
Links 16/03/2026: Moscow Experiencing Cellphone Internet Outages, "Salman Rushdie Is Tired of Talking About Free Speech"
Links for the day
Links 16/03/2026: Arctic Security and 'Mr. Nobody Against Putin'
Links for the day
Gemini Links 16/03/2026: KN95 Skins and CSS Surprises
Links for the day
Debian is Dying for Some of the Same Reasons IBM's Fedora is Rapidly Dying
Prioritising CoC censorship, not communities
The Register MS is Again Femmewashing GAFAM (Which Makes Widows) in Exchange for Money
This is a moral issue because they betray or harm women and prop up authoritarian regimes
Gemini Links 16/03/2026: AB 1043, Lagrange Android Beta 47, and Poetry
Links for the day
"Slop-forking" or "Vibe-forking" as the New 'Noble' Plagiarism
New Cloudflare Slop Project?
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part VII - Cult Mentality, Mobbing, Nepotism
Does the EPO actually believe in the law?
2026 Microsoft Layoff Rumours
Surely if we had properly-functioning media, then someone would investigate this rather than rely on official statements from Microsoft and WARN notices
EPO Strike This Week
contact your national representatives about it
Gemini Links 15/03/2026: "Create Opportunities for Good Things to Happen", DOSbook, and Bitcoin Criticism
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 15, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, March 15, 2026
Pirate Praveen Arimbrathodiyil & Debian denouncing volunteers, hiding romances
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock