Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 28, 2025

• Ruben Schade ☛ pkgsrc 2025Q4 released

  The release announcement includes more detail, including updates to PostgreSQL, QEMU, and LXQt. Is it silly to admit that I’m also unreasonably happy to see CDE in these sorts of announcements as well?

• Rajeesh K Nambiar: A font with built-in TeX syntax highlighting

  At the TUG2025 conference, I presented a talk about the development of a new colour font, which does automatic syntax highlighting for TeX documents/snippets. The idea was floated by CVR, and was inspired by a prior-art of HTML/CSS syntax highlighting font by Heikki Lotvonen.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chromium

    • Barry Kauler ☛ Ungoogled Chromium is back

      I took this out of the menu a few releases of EasyOS ago, as the download URL had become broken. But, have fix it, and Ungoogled is back in the menu:

      [...]

      I know that some people will be very happy about this. This will be in the next release of EasyOS.   
      

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice Viewer now available on Meta Quest VR headsets

    For years we’ve maintained LibreOffice Viewer for Android, which lets you access files in these formats on mobile devices: Open Document Format (odt, ods, odp, odg)...

• Standards/Consortia

  • CCC ☛ Excuse me, what precise time is It?

    With PTP 1588, AES67, and SMPTE 2110, we can transmit synchronous audio and video with sub-millisecond latency over the asynchronous medium Ethernet. But how do you make hundreds of devices agree on the exact same nanosecond on a medium that was never meant to care about time? Precision Time Protocol (IEEE 1588) tries to do just that. It's the invisible backbone of realtime media standards like AES67 and SMPTE 2110, proprietary technologies such as Dante, and even critical systems powering high-frequency trading, cellular networks, and electric grids.

  • CCC ☛ Who cares about the Baltic Jammer? – Terrestrial Navigation in the Baltic Sea Region

    We’ll start by showing what GNSS interference actually means in practice: aircraft losing navigation data, ships switching to manual control, and entire regions facing timing outages — such as the recent disruption of telecommunications in Gdańsk during Easter 2025.