GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 26, 2025

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ From Boston to bootc | LINUX Unplugged 616

    Fresh off Red Bait Summit, Chris is eyeing an exit from NixOS. What's luring him back to the mainstream? Our highlights, and the signal from the noise from open source's biggest event of the year.

• Applications

  • Iustin Pop: Corydalis v2025.21.0 - new features!

    I just released yesterday a new version of Corydalis (https://demo.corydalis.io, https://github.com/iustin/corydalis). To me personally, it’s a major improvement, since the native (my own) image viewer finally gets zooming, panning, gesture handling, etc. This is table-stakes for an image viewer, but oh well, it took me a long time to implement it, because of multiple things: lack of time, the JS library I was using for gestures was pretty old and unmaintained and it caused more trouble than was helping, etc.

    The feature is not perfect, and on the demo site there’s already a bug since all images are smaller than the screen, and this I didn’t test 😅, so double-click to zoom doesn’t work: says “Already at minimum zoom”, but zooming otherwise (+/- on the keyboard, mouse wheel, gesture) works.

• WINE or Emulation

  • ScummVM ☛ ScummVM 2.9.1 “Slappin da BASS” is here!

    Get ready to jam and slap da BASS!

    Yes, it is this time of the year again! Please welcome the first ScummVM release of the year: ScummVM 2.9.1.

    This maintenance release mainly focused on fixing bugs that our developers and users have uncovered since our last stable release.

    As usual, several engines and platforms received their fair share of bug fixes and improvements: Hey Hi (AI) AGS, Asylum, BAGEL, Bladerunner, Hopkins, MADS, NGI, SCI, SCUMM, Sky, Sword1, Tetraedge, Tinsel, Tucker, TwinE, and TWP.

    Our porters also went on a bug-hunting spree, so all we can provide is a small summary of the latest and greatest fixes!

    The Nintendo 3DS (yes, we do not care about end-of-life dates!) has the GUI appropriately displayed if it is configured to use the top screen only.

• Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE Stopmotion release 0.9.0 ported to Qt6

      Being the workhorse for more than a decade, it took me by surprise that Qt 5 is going to run out of support tomorrow. Honestly, Qt 6 was released in late 2020 and I prefer using modern code bases that use features from the C++17 and C++20 standards. So, no reason to hold me back.

      I am pleased to announce the release of KDE Stopmotion 0.9.0. It consist of the Qt 6 port and has no additional features or bug fixes. Quite boring, it does not even look nicer or different at all. Many thanks to Florian Satzger and Mark Penner for helping with the port when I got stuck.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Distro Watch ☛ DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

    In our Questions and Answers column this week we talk about preventing a system from going to sleep and different approaches we can take to keep systems running. Do you usually put your computer to sleep or leave it running? Let us know in this week's Opinion Poll. Then we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. We've also been busy adding new projects to our database with AxOS, Drauger OS, and Securonis now featured. Read on to learn more about these three projects. Finally, we are grateful to everyone who sent us donations this month. We appreciate you and all of our readers. Have a wonderful week and we wish you happy reading!

  • EasyOS

    • Barry Kauler ☛ Fix for run-in-terminal

      run-in-terminal is a very handy entry in the right-click menu, introduced here:

      https://bkhome.org/news/202411/rox-right-click-run-in-terminal.html

      Forum member don570 reported strange behaviour: [...]

    • Barry Kauler ☛ Initrd fixlayers .desktop multiple Exec lines

      The problem reported by FeodorF and solution found by Caramel:

      https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=149322#p149322

      I implemented the fix, testing for all "Exec=..." lines in the .desktop file: [...]

  • BSD

    • Undeadly ☛ New profiling subsystem committed to -current

      There it is, profiling tailored to work well with some of the core code sanity features originated by the developers of our favorite operating system. As always, the code should be available for test in fresh snapshots, and feedback from real life testing is appreciated.

  • Debian Family

    • Otto Kekäläinen: New Debian package creation from upstream git repository

      In this post, I demonstrate the optimal workflow for creating new Debian packages in 2025, preserving the upstream git history. The motivation for this is to lower the barrier for sharing improvements to and from upstream, and to improve software provenance and supply-chain security by making it easy to inspect every change at any level using standard git tooling.

      Key elements of this workflow include: [...]

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Eulogy for Father John Brosnan by Peter Norden AO

    Peter Norden AO, then Policy Director for Jesuit Social Services gave the eulogy. He makes some interesting comments about Fr Brosnan's philosophy. This is invaluable to our understanding of the flaws in the Code of Conduct (CoC) gaslighting phenomena.

  • Education

    • BSDly ☛ That grumpy BSD guy: That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List

      I was recently (late May of 2025) asked to provide a list of things I have written over the years that would be suited to offer useful insights to someone not familiar with my work or the field(s) I cover.

      In addition to the book I wrote and have revised when the time seemed right, I have written the odd blog post over the years, and this is the list I came up with, in roughly reverse chronological order: [...]

  • Programming/Development

    • Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Iterators and adaptors

      Previously it was mentioned that Python and C++ do iteration quite differently. Python has "statefull" objects that have a .next() method that returns a new object or throws a StopIteration exception. Incidentally Rust does exactly the same thing, except that it uses an optional type rather than an exception. C++ does not work like this, instead it has a concept of a "start" and "end" of a sequence and the machinery keeps incrementing the start until it reaches the end.

    • Rlang ☛ Little useless-useful R functions – Absurd bias DAG with useless mental shortcuts

      Exploring graphs is always a fun. Attaching the edges and nodes with real examples of psychological effects and accompany them with useless mental shortcuts is beyond fun. This is why we will call it a “cognitive bias” explorer using DAG.

      Here are the graphs edges and nodes and we are calling them biases and weird links. Because, yes 🙂🙂 Let’s mix the math with psychology.