Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 30, 2026

• [Repeat] OSTechNix ☛ Best Open Source Tools to Build Document Processing Pipeline on Linux

  A document processing pipeline is a sequence of automated stages that transforms documents into usable information. Depending on the document, those stages may include file detection, PDF processing, image preprocessing, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), text extraction, classification, storage, and indexing. Production systems also rely on supporting components such as messaging, monitoring, and logging to keep the pipeline reliable.

  No single application performs every stage well. Production-ready document processing systems combine specialized open-source tools that each solve a specific problem. This modular approach makes a document processing pipeline easier to maintain, scale, and adapt as requirements change.

  In this detailed guide, we will explore widely used open-source document processing tools for Linux. For each category, you'll learn what the tools do, where they fit in a document processing workflow, their strengths and trade-offs, and what to consider before choosing one.

• Peter 'CzP' Czanik ☛ Syslog-ng hardening using Tor

  For many years, I didn’t think that Tor could be useful for me. However, I’ve recently found a Gist on Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub that describes how you can use it to harden your central syslog-ng server. And while I have yet to try it, at least now I have a reason to actually test Tor.

  The Tor website describes the project as follows: “Protect yourself against tracking, surveillance, and censorship.” I live in a country where thankfully I do not need these, nor do I perform any activities for which Tor would be useful. However, sometimes I hear from syslog-ng users that they want to hide their logging infrastructure with something more than what mutual TLS authentication makes possible.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • OSTechNix ☛ InnoDB Registration as a STORAGE ENGINE Failed: MySQL Database Recovery Guide

    As a database administrator, you may encounter the MySQL server error:

    Plugin 'InnoDB' registration as a STORAGE ENGINE failed

    This error indicates that MySQL is unable to load the InnoDB storage engine during startup. It can occur for several reasons, including corrupted InnoDB system files, damaged tablespaces, incomplete upgrades, or other issues that prevent InnoDB from initializing correctly. The exact cause can usually be identified by reviewing the MySQL error log.

    When this happens, the impact can range from MySQL Server failing to start completely to partial availability where tools such as MySQL Workbench can connect but queries against InnoDB tables fail. Since InnoDB is the default storage engine for most MySQL installations, this type of failure can make a large portion of a database inaccessible.

    This article covers hands-on experience dealing with this situation. We will start with the standard MySQL recovery approaches that should always be attempted first, then explore how Stellar Repair for MySQL performed when those methods were not sufficient.

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

  • WordPress ☛ WordPress 7.1 Beta 4

    WordPress 7.1 Beta 4 is ready for download and testing!  This beta release is intended for testing and development only. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, use a test environment or local site to explore the new features. How to Test WordPress 7.1 Beta […]

• Education

  • APNIC ☛ DNS topics at IETF 126

    The 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was held in Vienna at the end of July 2026. It was a busy week, with many meetings and conversations. These are some notes from Domain Name System (DNS)-related sessions that I found interesting. I’ll dive into a select set of presentations and topics in some depth, avoiding brief summaries and generalizations if I can!

  • APNIC ☛ BGP topics from IETF 126

    BGP ORIGIN, ASPAs, PAVA, and ASRAs at IETF 126.

  • Rlang ☛ Introduction to All Things About bpvars, the R package for Forecasting with Bayesian Panel Vector Autoregressions workshop

    This session is a unique opportunity to learn to use the bpvars package for forecasting with Bayesian panel vector autoregressions in a wide range of applications spanning: [...]

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • Negroni Venture Studios ☛ Sovereignty is a substrate

    A chip is not a thing you design and then own: there are a number of steps in between. A chip is a thing that gets designed, then fabricated, then packaged, then tested, and every one of those steps has its own map of organisations who can get in your way and make things grind to a halt.

    Britain genuinely leads in design: look at Arm, and the long tail of talent around it. But design is the most portable layer in the entire stack. Arm’s whole business is the portability: it licenses an abstraction that anyone can implement on whatever process node is going. That is a wonderful thing to own if you are running a licensing company. It is also very nearly worthless as sovereignty, because the thing you own is the thing that travels most easily. My buddy Alasdair made a version of this argument about the Rekursiv last month: if you put the value above the silicon, it outlives any particular chip. There’s an uncomfortable corollary. Put the value above the silicon and it belongs to whoever can license it, from anywhere.

• GNU Projects

  • LWN ☛ GCC steering committee announces Hey Hi (AI) policy

    The GCC steering committee has announced that it has accepted an AI contributions policy recommended by the GCC Hey Hi (AI) policy working

    The policy, in part, states that the project will decline any "legally significant contributions which include LLM-generated content or are derived from LLM-generated content".

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Pro Publica ☛ Senate Leaders Push U.S. DOT Over Bus Safety Data

      Two leading Democrats on the U.S. Senate committee that oversees transportation safety pressed the nation’s regulator of buses on Wednesday to provide proof it can detect troubled private companies that provide services to schools and municipalities.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Johnny Decimal ☛ Indicating levels of Johnny.Decimal complexity

      While the nature of the content was obviously advanced, I should have made it more obvious that this is an advanced concept and is very much optional. Most of you don't need to care, and don't need to feel like this is something you should be doing, or that you're missing out.

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Categorizing Open Access Business Models

      Tasha Mellins-Cohen offered a seven-category framework in 2024, which has proven useful for the field. Today I offer a three-category framework as an alternative, not so much in disagreement, but as a way of seeing how contours of the business model landscape have smoothed out after a period of experimentation and to aid in matching models to open access mandate requirements.

      In my view, models for funding open access journal article publishing can be sorted into three categories, organized by who pays and what they pay for: transactional, collective action, and subvention.