GNU/Linux, BSD, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 31, 2025

• Instructionals/Technical

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Abusive Monopolist Microsoft SQL Server on AlmaLinux 10 [Ed: It does not actually run on Linux, it is proprietary, and it's controlled by a highly hostile, aggressive, even criminal company]

    AlmaLinux 10, as a robust enterprise-grade GNU/Linux distribution, provides an ideal foundation for running SQL Server workloads with enhanced stability and security features.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Feishin on Linux Mint 22

    Linux Mint 22 “Wilma” users seeking a modern, feature-rich music streaming solution will find Feishin to be an exceptional choice. This comprehensive music player represents a significant evolution in self-hosted media streaming applications, offering seamless integration with popular music servers while delivering an intuitive user experience.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • TuMFatig ☛ Why are you (still) using OpenBSD?

      Last week-end, I was invited to the UNIX Social Camp in Dijon, France to talk about the reasons I still use OpenBSD these days and why should others do so; or at least, have a look at OpenBSD

      This post is an English transcription of the original French slides that are available here

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • CentOS ☛ CentOS Board Meeting Recap, July 2025

      The recording of the June CentOS Board meeting is now available. Watch the recording Read the minutes The recording has timestamps so you can skip to the parts that interest you.

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • CNX Software ☛ Raspberry Pi RP2350 A4 stepping fixes E9 GPIO Erratum, glitching bugs, introduces 2MB flash variants

      The Raspberry Pi RP2350 dual-core Arm/RISC-V has gotten a new version – A4 stepping – addressing bugs and security vulnerabilities, notably the infamous E9 GPIO erratum and glitching bugs in the A2 stepping identified by the 2024 Hacking Challenge.

    • CNX Software ☛ ReSpeaker XMOS XVF3800 4-mic array board features ESP32-S3 module, also works over USB

      Seeed Studio’s “ReSpeaker XMOS XVF3800 with XIAO ESP32S3” board is a 4-mic array board with XMOS XVF3800 voice processor and ESP32-S3 wireless MCU for standalone operation, but it can also be used as a USB microphone array for computers and SBCs.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Events

    • FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, August 1, starting at 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC)

      Join the FSF and friends on Friday, August 1 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

    • FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, August 8, starting at 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC)

      Join the FSF and friends on Friday, August 8 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • PostgreSQL ☛ pgAdmin 4 v9.6 Released

      The pgAdmin Development Team is pleased to announce pgAdmin 4 version 9.6. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes 4 new features and 7 bug fixes/housekeeping changes. For more details, please see the release notes.

  • Programming/Development

    • Python

      • SANS ☛ Triage is Key Python to the Rescue, (Tue, Jul 29th)

        When you need to quickly analyze a lot of data, there is one critical step to perform: Triage. In forensic investigations, this step is critical because it allows investigators to quickly identify, prioritize, and isolate the most relevant or high value evidence from large volumes of data, ensuring that limited time and resources are focused on artifacts most likely to reveal key facts about an incident. Sometimes, a quick script will be enough to speed up this task.

      • LWN ☛ Deep immutability for Python

        Python has recently seen a number of experiments to improve its parallel performance, including exposing subinterpreters as part of the standard library. These allow separate threads within the same Python process to run simultaneously, as long as any data sent between them is copied, rather than shared. PEP 795 ("Deep Immutability in Python") seeks to make efficient sharing of data between subinterpreters possible by allowing Python objects to be "frozen", so that they can be accessed from multiple subinterpreters without copying or synchronization. That task is more difficult than it seems, and the PEP prompted a good deal of skepticism from the Python community.

        When threads concurrently access data, care must be taken to avoid race conditions. Historically, Python solved this problem with the global interpreter lock (GIL), which allows only one thread to access Python objects at a time. The Python community has been working to remove the GIL for several years, in order to make multithreaded code more efficient. Most recently, that has resulted in the creation of "free-threaded Python", a separate experimental build of the language that lacks a GIL. Now, users of free-threaded Python are faced with the problem of manually synchronizing threads, as users of other languages are. Subinterpreters offer a less error-prone alternative: separate, isolated memory spaces each with their own GIL. Objects can be sent between them using queues that perform a deep copy of the object to keep the subinterpreters isolated.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • PDFs must die

      We the data professionals, we hate PDFs. They might look good and structured for your human eyes, but the data inside them is a mess, unstructured and not suitable to be processed by computer programs.