GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 25, 2026

• Server

  • Sven Luijten ☛ NAS access woes

    After turning on the NAS for the first time in the new place, I thought plugging it in and turning it on was the extent of the setup. But alas, this turned into an evening project.

• Applications

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ iDescriptor Lets You Manage & Interact with iPhone/iPad in Linux

    Looking a tool to manage your iPhone or iPad in PC or laptop? Try the free open-source iDescriptor app that works in Linux, Windows, and macOS. It’s a Rust written and Qt-based application that allows to manage and interact with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod through either USB or Wi-Fi.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Hackaday ☛ A 1990s Homebrew OS With GUI And Web Browser, In AM29000 Machine Code

    The AM29000 series of processors were AMD’s entry into the world of super-fast next-generation silicon of the late 1980s. It was a time when ARM was still a niche architecture in a British educational computer, the 68000 series was still a major player, and it was by no means certain that the x86 would maintain its position. It therefore wasn’t an unreasonable choice for someone building a high performance computer at the time, which is what [Oscar Toledo G.] and his father did. If that wasn’t enough, he went on to write an operating system for it in AM29000 assembly, complete with a GUI, a C compiler, and an up-to-date web browser for the late 1990s. The story makes for an engaging read.

  • HaikuOS ☛ [GSoC 2026] Modernizing Haiku’s Bluetooth stack: Implementing support for HFP profile - Progress Report

    The goal of this post is to document the changes I made during the GSoC period and the current state of the project. I would also like to thank waddlesplash for his continued support throughout the project.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD ☛ FreeBSD Foundation Intern Sourojeet Adhikari on Bringing ROCm to FreeBSD

      Sourojeet is studying Mathematical Physics and entering the third year of his degree. This summer, he joined the FreeBSD Foundation as an intern, working on a project that combines several of his interests: systems programming, GPU computing, and open source.

      We spoke with Sourojeet about his path into open source, the challenges of bringing ROCm to FreeBSD, what he learned from debugging difficult problems, and why students shouldn’t be intimidated by contributing to a large open source project.

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Tiny Wins for Packagers: End-of-Week Update (2026-08-21)

      🙇‍♀️ New Contributors The most important thing in Free Software, new people! We had a 1 new contributor to OBS this week! 🚀 Please give a warm welcome to Tanner Kvarfordt @Kardbord who got their first commit merged. Maybe it be followed by many more. Thank you so much!

  • Arch Family

    • It's FOSS ☛ Omarchy GNU/Linux Just Got $8 Million From Tech's Biggest Names

      A new nonprofit is being setup that would house all that money, and Hyprland is the first external project to benefit.

      David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, has put a number on how serious he is about desktop Linux. That number is eight million dollars, and it's going into a brand new nonprofit called the Omacom Foundation.

      DHH is incorporating the foundation now, set to cover the Omarchy trademark, its infrastructure and hosting, promotion for the project, and funding for the open source developers whose work it depends on.

      [...]

      Michael Dell of Dell Technologies, Patrick Collison of Stripe, Tobi Lütke of Shopify, Jack Dorsey of Block, Matthew Prince of Cloudflare, Jason Fried of 37signals, Brendan Iribe of Sesame, and DHH himself each put in a million dollars to make it happen.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 24.04 gets a big open-vm-tools update

      A major update to open-vm-tools, a package that integrates GNU/Linux virtual machines with VMware hypervisors, is rolling out to users of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. “Without SRUing the newer version users get issues running on more recent hypervisors”, Canonical’s Lena Voytek explained in a backport request. It’s a full backport from Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to support platform enablement to benefit those running 24.04 LTS.

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 26.10 ‘Stonking Stingray’ hits feature freeze

      Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed ‘Stonking Stingray’, entered feature freeze on 20 August – though the formal announcement arrive later than usual. From this point onwards, development focus shifts from landing major changes to improving them, along with the rest of the package set, ahead of the final, stable Ubuntu 26.10 release in October.