GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 21, 2025

• HowTo Geek ☛ The new Kali Linux, another Raspberry Pi imager, Ubuntu Studio's redesign, and more: Linux news roundup

  This was another busy week in the Linux ecosystem, with a new major release for Kali Linux, updates to Docker and Armbian, and much more. Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • TechRadar ☛ Better late than never? 53-year-old HP bus standard finally gets a Linux driver, boasting 8MB/s bandwidth

    A bus standard introduced by HP in 1972 has finally gained stable Linux driver support, more than fifty years after its initial release.

    HP created the interface to link laboratory instruments with computers, and it later became known as IEEE 488 after standardization in 1975.

    The design allowed multiple devices to share a single bus of up to twenty meters while offering data transfer speeds of up to 8MB/s, which was impressive for its time.

  • Security

    • NDSS 2025 - Too Subtle to Notice: Investigating Executable Stack Issues in Linux Systems

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Internet Archive ☛ UNIX V4 tape from University of Utah (raw) : Computer History Museum : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

    UNIX V4 tape from the University of Utah, received by Martin Newell in June 1974 around when he modeled the Utah Teapot.

    This is the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum's Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek's readtape tool.

  • BSD

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Finally upgraded the fleet to FreeBSD 15!

      It was a hectic few weeks in the lead-up to the Christmas shutdown period at our small hosting company, so this morning I was able to steal some time and get my own little fleet upgraded to FreeBSD 15! This included: [...]

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Kevin Fenzi: home infra weekly recap: pre holidays 2025

      Time for another weekly recap, but since I am on vacation for the holidays already, this one is things I've done at home.

      There's often things I just don't have time for or energy for in my home infrastructure, so I add those things to a list and try and do those things over the holidays. Of course often I don't get to them all, or even most of them, but it's a nice list to look at for things to do.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Loris Cro ☛ Simplistic Comptime Column Safety in SQLite Queries

      I’m working on a project that uses SQLite for persistence and I’m using a Zig library that offers a fairly thin wrapper on top of the SQLite C API.

      In this blog post I’ll show you how I added some comptime safety to my queries in a hilariously low number of lines of code, but it should be noted that the approach I’m about to show you is tailored to my specific needs.

      I’ll talk about more general (and solid) solutions later on.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Darren Goossens ☛ Choose your desktop in RDP

      Using Windows RDP to get into a Ubuntu box, and I just wanted it to log me in to MATE instead of the default, which is unusable for my old brain that likes a desktop with a menu and icons.