I have been working on and off for almost a year trying to get reproducible builds (the same source tree always builds an identical cdrom) on NetBSD. I did not think at the time it would take as long or be so difficult, so I did not keep a log of all the changes I needed to make. I was also not the only one working on…
How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way
A former coworker pointed me to the news today that freshmeat has suddenly ceased operations. I spent the rest of the day flooded with memories and the urge to jot a few of them down before they’re…
Do you contribute to open source software (OSS)? We'd love to hear your perspective.
In March 2024, a backdoor was discovered in xz, a (de)-compression software that is regularly used at the core of Linux distributions to unpack source tarballs...
To date, we've shaved the Bionic (18.04 LTS) minimal images down by over 53%, since Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and trimmed nearly 100 packages and...
For many years people with visual impairments and the legally blind have paid a steep price to access the Web on Windows-based computers. The market-leadin
When I wrote Why is Debian the way it is? , a year and a half ago, I was asked to also cover why Debian changes the software it packages. Here's a brief list of examples of why that happens:
Stronger, smaller, and easier to run, thanks to an upgraded network architecture, universal binaries, and more!
For the last month or so, the IRC world has been embroiled in drama over the new ownership of Freenode. For me, it culminated yesterday when I was banned from Freenode.
By Dr. Christian Lundkvist and John Lilic
Meet Glowforge, the 3D laser printer that makes magical things at the push of a button.
Updates on what happens across the GNOME project from week to week
We'd also like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox!
Thunderbird will support Microsoft Exchange Web Services (EWS) natively, all written in Rust! Read about our Rusty adventures, the technical nature of the EWS
Nix reference manual version overview
We're announcing HashiCorp Vagrant 2.0. Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing development environments. Vagrant 2.0 supports provisioning development environments on VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V, Docker, AWS, GCP, and more. It can virtualize Windows, macOS, and a dozen other new operating systems. Vagrant 2.0…
Introducing KSQL, a streaming SQL engine for Apache Kafka. KSQL provides a simple and completely interactive SQL interface for processing data in Kafka.
New SBCL versions are usually released at the end of each month: check the Sourceforge File List to see the current version. The new features of all SBCL releases are listed below.
Today I released the next development version of Wireshark, 1.11.0. This marks a major change in the direction of the project. We’re switching our user interface library from GTK+ to Qt. Both libraries make it easy for developers write applications that will run on different platforms without having to rewrite a lot…
Matrix is a protocol for decentralised, federated and secure communications, created and maintained by New Vector, a company split between London, UK and Rennes, France. It's based on RESTful HTTP/JSON APIs, documented in open specifications, and is designed to be usable for anything that requires real-time-ish…
Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of 0 A.D. Alpha 26: “Zhuangzi” (pronounced: /ˈʒwæŋˈziː/), the …
Forgotten TODOs: ideas for contributing to open-source projects
At Browserling we are huge open-source fans and we have open-sourced 90 node.js modules! That's right! 90 node.js modules. All written from scratch. We're crazy! Edit: Now we've open-sourced several hundred! Here is the complete list of all the modules together with their brief descriptions. We have published all…
It takes the most exquisite measurements you can imagine, recording the changes in current associated with different bits of DNA.
