Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 20, 2026

• Peter 'CzP' Czanik ☛ Call for testing: syslog-ng 4.11 is coming

  The syslog-ng 4.11 release is right around the corner. Thousands of automatic tests run before each new piece of source code is merged, but nothing can replace real-world hands-on tests. So help us testing Elasticsearch / OpenSearch data-streams, Kafka source, cmake fixes and much more!

• GNOME ☛ Ignacy Kuchciński: Digital Wellbeing Contract: Conclusion

  A lot of progress has been made since my last Digital Wellbeing update two months ago. That post covered the initial screen time limits feature, which was implemented in the Parental Controls app, Settings and GNOME Shell. There’s a screen recording in the post, created with the help of a custom GNOME OS image, in case you’re interested.

• Isoken Ibizugbe: Mid-Point Project Progress

  Halfway There

  Hurray! I have officially reached the 6-week mark, the halfway point of my Outreachy internship. The time has flown by incredibly fast, yet it feels short because there is still so much exciting work to do.

  I remember starting this journey feeling overwhelmed, trying to gain momentum. Today, I feel much more confident. I began with the apps_startstop task during the contribution period, writing manual test steps and creating preparation Perl scripts for the desktop environments. Since then, I’ve transitioned into full automation and taken a liking to reading openQA upstream documentation when I have issues or for reference.

• Hellen Chemtai: Internship Highlights at Outreachy: My Journey with Debian OpenQA

  Highlights

  Hello world . I am an intern here at Outreachy working with Debian OpenQA Image testing team. The work consists of testing Images with OpenQA. The internship has reached midpoint and here are some of the highlights that I have had so far.

• Events

  • Jonathan Dowland ☛ Jonathan Dowland: FOSDEM 2026

    I'm going to FOSDEM 2026!

    I'm presenting in the Containers dev room. My talk is Java Memory Management in Containers and it's scheduled as the first talk on the first day. I'm the warm-up act!

    The Java devroom has been a stalwart at FOSDEM since 2004 (sometimes in other forms), but sadly there's no Java devroom this year. There's a story about that, but it's not mine to tell.

  • Sahilister ☛ Sahil Dhiman: Conferences, why?

    Back in December, I was working to help organize multiple different conferences. One has already happened; the rest are still works in progress. That’s when the thought struck me: why so many conferences, and why do I work for them?

    I have been fairly active in the scene since 2020. For most conferences, I usually arrive late in the city on the previous day and usually leave the city on conference close day. Conferences for me are the place to meet friends and new folks and hear about them, their work, new developments, and what’s happening in their interest zones. I feel naturally happy talking to folks. In this case, folks inspire me to work. Nothing can replace a passionate technical and social discussion, which stretches way into dinner parties and later.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Version 1 of TDF Community Bylaws

    The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit entity behind the LibreOffice project. It collects donations from users, and employs a small team to support and coordinate the worldwide community that makes the software.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Craig Small: WordPress 6.9 for Debian

    The Debian packages for WordPress version 6.9 were uploaded today. The upstream website says you can add notes and move graphics around, making for an easier and nicer editing experience.

    I’m not personally sure about that, generally if things change to much people get annoyed but it seems at least the initial simple stuff has stayed the same.

• Education

  • Asterisk Magazine ☛ The Dream of the Universal Library—Asterisk

    The Internet promised easy access to every book ever written. Why can’t we have nice things?

    At the turn of the millennium, Google Books and similar mass digitization projects for the world’s print books were widely seen to promise a universal digital library for reading access on the web. Instead, the future we thought we’d get for human readers has arrived only for machines.

  • Olimex ☛ RISC-V EUR 1 retro computer soldering workshop at High School of Mathematics in Plovdiv

    On Saturday, 17 January 2026, on the occasion of the 55th anniversary of the founding of the High School of Mathematics OMG “Akademik Kiril Popov,” a workshop was held for soldering the Plovdiv-developed Open Source Hardware retro microcomputer Olimex RVPC, featuring a 32-bit RISC-V processor, a PS/2 keyboard, and a VGA monitor.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Nick Groenen ☛ The characters ä and ä may look the same, but in fact they're not - Nick's Blog and Digital Garden

    The Unicode standard allows for certain (visually) identical characters to be represented in different ways. For example the character ä may be represented as a single combined codepoint “Latin Small Letter A with Diaeresis” (U+00E4) or by the combination of “Latin Small Letter A” (U+0061) followed by “Combining Diaeresis” (U+0308). 1 The semantic meaning and visual representation is exactly the same, but the underlying codepoints are different.