GNU/Linux and Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 06, 2026

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ I See Live People | LINUX Unplugged 648

    We unleash a networking monitoring tool to spot new devices, track changes in real time, and fire alerts straight into Home Assistant, MQTT, and your phone.

• Applications

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ VLC 3.0.23 Released with Security Fixes & Qt6 Pre-support [Ubuntu PPA]

    VLC, the popular free open-source media player, released new 3.0.23 version few days ago for Linux, Windows, and macOS. This is a small release that fixed some bugs, updated the dark palette, and improved the compatibility for recent dependency libraries. First of all, the new version included some fixes for security vulnerabilities.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping - Review

    I had not played the previous game, The Cost of Salami, so I jumped into this adventure game without prior experience and expectations. It’s a fairly straightforward game. You play as the Duck Detective and you have to solve mysteries, find culprits, and decide who goes to jail in the end! It’s a 2D game, with a cartoon look, and all characters appear as flat elements who jump around over an isometric background.

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

  • DebugPoint ☛ LXQt 2.3.0: Best New Features

    LXQt 2.3.0 brings improved Wayland support and few tweaks. LXQt 2.3.0 rolled out a few weeks ago, bringing a fresh wave of improvements that make this Qt-based DE even more appealing for those who value speed and customization on their GNU/Linux setups.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Another fix for drive read speed test

    In Easy 7.1.2, the code in the initrd to test drive read speed was changed: [...]

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Hackaday ☛ Modifying A QingPing Air Quality Monitor For Local MQTT Access

      The QingPing Air Quality Monitor 2 is an Android-based device that not only features a touch screen with the current air quality statistics of the room, but also includes an MQTT interface that normally is used in combination with the QingPing mobile app and the Xiaomi IoT ecosystem. Changing it to report to a local MQTT server instead for integration with e.g. Home Assistant can be done in an official way that still requires creating a cloud account, or you can just do it yourself via an ADB shell and some file modifications as [ea] has done.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Programming/Development

    • Jon Chiappetta: Going back to re-implement the work I once started for the VPN TUN C program…

      Long screen cap warning: I recently went back to reimplement a test program I started of a basic VPN TUN application. I implemented a similar version of the work that I placed in the OpenVPN framework but with a highly-modified ARC4 stream cipher.

    • Jon Chiappetta: Generating better random numbers in C with the help of /dev/urandom (practical-random) and (s)rand (pseudo-random) [88-bit seed]

      This example code will first load in 88-bits worth of /dev/urandom data into an initial seed variable which will then feed the first 32-bits into the srand() algorithm seed. Then the regular rand() function can be used to mix in the generated random data into the seeded random data to create a new stream of random output data to be used by the application.

    • Jon Chiappetta: A Year Of The Releases Of My Free Apps – 90 Day Stats

      I tried to make some free apps for both OS’s (MacOS and iOS) and I will try to keep them going into the new year. Looks like I will need to dedicate some work on the newer TurnTable app as it is showing 10 crashes, however, I’m not sure how to be able to determine or debug why the app may have crashed for some users yet…