GNU/Linux and Free Software Stories

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 23, 2024

• GNU/Linux

  • Gizmodo ☛ Best Linux Hosting Providers: Flexible, Fast, and Secure

    Linux web hosting is the preferred choice for many hosting veterans. It’s highly customizable and allows you to experiment with different parameters. Moreover, Linux’s flexibility is undeniable, as its open-source nature lets you adapt the server to your needs—provided you have some technical knowledge.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Hackaday ☛ Optimizing Your Linux Shell Experience

      Are you familiar with huffman encoding? That’s where you pick shorter codes for more frequent letters. Morse code is the same way. Shorter characters are the ones you are most likely to use. [Matheus Richard] had the same idea for optimizing your workflow in the Linux shell. The idea is to measure what commands you use the most and make them shorter.

    • Install VNC Server on AlmaLinux 9 or Rocky to Access it via VNC Viewer

      VNC (Virtual Network Computing) helps control and manage the remotely running graphical GNU/Linux systems. We can install and configure the VNC on any GNU/Linux system, including Almalinux 9 and other RPM distros such as RedHat, CentOS, Rocky, and Oracle Linux. Therefore, it is an essential tool for administrators and users needing remote desktop capabilities.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Volker Krause ☛ KDE @ 38C3

        Even bigger than FOSDEM and much wider in scope many impactful collaborations during the past couple of years can be traced back to contacts made at Congress. Be it KDE Eco, joint projects with the Open Transport community, the weather and emergency alert aggregation server or indoor routing to just name a few.

        At last year’s edition, 37C3, we had a KDE assembly (think “stand” or “booth” at other events) for the first time. That not only helps people to find us, it’s also very useful anchor point for the growing KDE delegation.

        This year we’ll further improve on that, by being there with even more people and by having the KDE assembly as part of the Bits & Bäume Habitat. That not only comes with some shared infrastructure like a workshop space but also puts us next to some of our friends, like OSM, FSFE and Wikimedia.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Linuxiac ☛ Home Assistant Launches New Voice Assistant Hardware

    Home Assistant, a free and open-source platform for managing and automating smart homes, has announced the release of the Voice Preview Edition, a new piece of hardware designed to accelerate progress on open, private voice assistants.

    The new device promises high-quality audio processing, a sleek design, and a seamless user experience—important features for ensuring that more people can take advantage of voice assistants without feeling subject to data mining or constrained by hidden walls of proprietary software.

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • James G ☛ How Artemis retrieves web feeds

      Artemis, the calm web reader I am building, updates once a day with the most recent posts from the authors you are following. I have designed Artemis to update on this cadence so that I don’t feel compelled to check my reader several times each day for new updates. Months after starting to use the software, I have found I check Artemis substantially less than the software I use that can update at any time. I feel calmer. I don’t feel like I need to keep checking to miss out.

      I wanted to document the process behind how Artemis retrieves web feeds from a technical perspective.

    • Mozilla

      • Don Marti ☛ turning off browser ad features from the command line

        The Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers both have built-in advertising features, which I generally turn off because putting advertising features, even "privacy-enhancing" ones, in browsers is a bad idea. But the problem with going in to the settings and changing stuff is that it only affects one browser profile at a time. So every time I add a user account or a new browser profile, I still need to go to Settings and change the defaults again.

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Avinash Sajjanshetty ☛ How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster

      This is the fascinating story of how researchers used Bloom filters cleverly to make SQLite 10x faster for analytical queries. These are my five-minute notes on the paper SQLite: Past, Present, and Future (2022). I’ll also explain some database internals and how databases implement joins.

  • Licensing / Legal

    • Linuxiac ☛ ScyllaDB Transitions to Source Available License

      According to ScyllaDB’s team, balancing two separate release streams for many years generated an ever-increasing workload. Maintaining both the free open source branch and the closed source enterprise edition demanded repeated decisions on which features to open source, how to differentiate offerings, and how to handle different support cycles.