news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Fedora
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Kevin Fenzi: infra weekly recap: End of sept 2025
Another saturday, time for another weekly recap. September is almost over and time is flying by. But of course fall is the very best season, so we have that going for us.
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Mobile Systems
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The Register UK ☛ Google to merge Android and ChromeOS in 2026, because AI
Chromebooks have helped Google to carve a niche in the laptop market, mostly with low-cost devices sold to schools for use by students. The search behemoth also created expensive and powerful Chromebooks.
But with Google – along with everyone else in tech sphere – adding AI to everything, it's Android's time to shine, he said.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Sean Conner ☛ Oh, it's a bug on my side that prevents full conditional requests
That rewrites the incoming If-None-Match header to work around the bug. Now maybe that whole conditional request thang with my webserver will now work properly.
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[Old] Diego Elio Pettenò ☛ Apache, ETag and “Not Modified”
The If-None-Match header in the request compares with the ETag header (Entity Tag) in the response coming from Apache. This header is generally considered opaque, and the client should have no insights in what it is meant to do. The server generally calculates its value based on either a checksum of the file (e.g. md5) or based on file size and last-modified time. On Apache HTTP Server, the FileETag directive is used to define which properties of the served files are used to generate the value provided in the response. The default that I’m using is MTime Size, which effectively means that changing the file in any way causes the ETag to change. The size part might actually be redundant here, since modification time is usually enough for my use cases, but this is the default…
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Document Foundation ☛ The artificial complexity of OOXML files (the XLSX case)
The post, published on 18 July 2025, which explained why an artificially complex XML schema, such as that used by Abusive Monopolist Microsoft 365 (formerly Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Office) files, is in fact a subtle tool for locking in users because it is invisible and impossible to detect without in-depth study, was picked up by various IT media outlets.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Omicron Limited ☛ New framework set to guide data reuse of public microbiome data
The article, "A roadmap for equitable reuse of public microbiome data," published in Nature Microbiology, proposes easy-to-follow guidelines that promote equitable sequence data reuse. For microbiome scientists who rely on shared data, adaptation of these guidelines could remove a major roadblock, saving hours otherwise spent tracking down dataset owners.
"Too often I'd find datasets that were valuable, but it would take me days to figure out who owned them," says Hug. "The idea is to integrate these standards into databases with a flag on the data, to ensure there's a clear connection back to the data owners."
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