today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 14, 2025

GNU/Linux and BSD

• Linuxiac ☛ Linuxiac Weekly Wrap-Up: Week 15 (Apr 7 – 13, 2025)

  Catch up on the latest GNU/Linux news: OpenSSH 10, KDE Frameworks 6.13, Mint’s LMDE 7 to feature full OEM install support, ArcoLinux winds down, GNU/Linux swap explained, and more.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux Foundation

    • TechCrunch ☛ Jim Zemlin on taking a ‘portfolio approach’ to Linux Foundation projects [Ed: Jim talking like his wife the scammer, seeing "Linux" as just some "BS" to make lots of money from. This is what happens when a geek (Torvalds) lets some unqualified charlatan inherit a "boss" responsibility, running Linux into the hands of its opponents.]

      Zemlin has led the charge at the Linux Foundation for some two decades, overseeing its transition through technological waves such as mobile, cloud, and — more recently — artificial intelligence. Its evolution from Linux-centricity to covering just about every technological nook is reflective of how technology itself doesn’t stand still — it evolves and, more importantly, it intersects.

• Games

  • Andrew Healey ☛ Visualizing Chess Bitboards

    When simulating board games on a computer, one of the challenges is keeping track of the game pieces. Bitboards are an efficient way to store game state in (usually) 64-bit integers. There are 64 positions on a chess board so we can use each bit as an on/off switch.

  • Michał Sapka ☛ Myst (1993)

    Myst became one of my favorite games of all time, so of course I played Riven. There will be a dedicated post, but spoiler ahead: wow! But Myst is sure worth a playthrou even after 30 years since it's premiere. It haven't dated much, and what has dated was improved in an endless series of remakes.

• Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Part 4 of SOK 2025

      Final update

      So this is my final blog regarding the Season of KDE 2025, I’m feeling happy for what I accomplished. Over the past few weeks, I’ve implemented PvP system for mancala game, this project has been a deep dive into game development, networking and user experience.

    • SoK '25 Weeks 5 to 10

      Hey everyone, It’s me again, back with the final update for this year’s Season of KDE. So, turns out things don’t really go as planned and it took me some extra time to bring it over the line.

      Since my last post, I wrote the tests for the Kalah game, the associated TUI, a greedy move selection and benchmarked Oware and Bohnenspiel. My mid-sem exams happened, in between, and delayed me by 2 weeks.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD/Unix

    • It's FOSS ☛ Birth of Unix

      A byte size history of Unix and its origin.

      Sometimes it feels like Unix has been around forever, at least to users who have used Linux, or BSD in any form for a decade or more now.

      Its ideals laid the groundwork for Linux, and it underpins macOS. A modern version (FreeBSD) is used on thousands of servers while Linux rules the server space along with the super computer industry.

      Even though the original form of it is a history, it remains a significant development to help start Linux and more.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

    • PCLOS Official ☛ PCLinuxOS Recent Updates

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • James G ☛ What if YouTube had slug-based URLs?

      The URL could convey more context about the linked resource but it is not. *Why not add a little more context? *The URL needs to be shared for someone to access a resource anyway.

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • PostgreSQL ☛ powa-archivist 5.0.2 is out!

      The PoWA team is pleased to announce the release of the version 5.0.2 of powa-archivist, the core extension of the PoWA project.

      PoWA (PostgreSQL Workload Analyzer) is a performance tool, compatible with all supported PostgreSQL versions. It allows to collect and aggregate metrics gathered from multiple PostgreSQL instances using various extensions covering all parts of PostgreSQL and provides real-time charts and graphs to help monitor and tune your servers. It also suggest optimizations, like global or per-query index suggestions, to easily improve performances.

  • Education

    • Kodi Foundation ☛ DevCon 2025 - Tirana - Part III

      Day Three dawns. We have a compressed schedule today before we break for individual workshops/breakouts - plus some people will be leaving us early in order to get home - so let's get to work.

    • Kodi Foundation ☛ DevCon 2025 - Tirana - Part II

      We kicked off the session with a bit of administrative insight from keithah - how the Board operates, our bank account structure, what we use for 2FA and virtual postal addresses, interaction with tax authorities for our non-profit status, and similar. Nothing of interest to the outside world, but an insight for our team members on some more of the internal moving parts.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Gunnar Wolf ☛ Gunnar Wolf: Culture as a positive freedom

  • Programming/Development

    • Didier Stevens ☛ Update: xorsearch.py Version 0.0.2