Entries tagged english
After seeing a video a few months ago demonstrating how a proprietary CAM solution uses machine learning and large language models to automatically generate CNC instructions, and successfully testing it on a real CNC, I began wondering if the same could be achieved with free software. I still do not know the answer, but I may be getting closer to finding out. Two weeks ago, I came across the video…
A while back, I came across the AI Fabric system created by Daniel Miessler. I liked its approach of providing command-line tools for filtering text using artificial idiocy services, allowing stepwise operations to be applied to a piece of text. The output of one operation can then serve as the input for another—in other words, Unix pipeline processing powered by large language models. I do no…
At last, I can run my own large language model artificial idiocy generator at home on a Debian testing host using Debian packages directly from the Debian archive. After months of polishing the llama.cpp , whisper.cpp and ggml packages, and their dependencies, I was very happy to see today that they all entered Debian testing this morning. Several release-critical issues in dependencies have been…
The LinuxCNC project continues to thrive. I believe this great software system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots, and hexapods would benefit even more from in-person developer gatherings. Therefore, we plan to organise another gathering this summer as well. We invite you to a small LinuxCNC and free software…
On Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending a presentation organized by the Norwegian Unix Users Group on implementing RISC-V using a small FPGA . This project is the result of a university teacher wanting to teach students assembly programming using a real instruction set, while still providing a simple and transparent CPU environment. The CPU in question implements the smallest set of opcodes…
I guess it is about time I posted a new summary of the free software and open culture activites and projects I have been involved in the last year. The days have been so packed the last year that I have failed with my intention to post at least one blog post per month, so this summary became rather long. I am sorry about this. This year was the year I got tired of the lack of new releases of the…
After some days of effort, I am happy to report that the great interactive application firewall OpenSnitch got a new version in Trixie, now with the Linux kernel based ebpf sniffer included for better accuracy. This new version made it possible for me to finally track down the rule required to avoid a deadlock when using it on a machine with the user home directory on NFS. The problematic…
Sadly, the interactive application firewall OpenSnitch have in practice been unmaintained in Debian for a while . A few days ago I decided to do something about it, and today I am happy with the result. This package monitor network traffic going in and out of a Linux machine, and show a popup dialog to the logged in desktop user, asking to approve or deny any new connections. It has proved very…
A few months ago, I found myself in the unfortunate position that I had to try to recover the password used to encrypt a Linux hard drive. Tonight a few friends of mine asked for details on this effort. I guess it is a good idea to expose the recipe I found to a wider audience, so here are a few relevant links and key findings. I've forgotten a lot, so part of this is taken from memory. I found a…
Following the 1.2.0beta1 release two weeks ago , a final 1.2.0 release of theora was wrapped up today. This new release is tagged in the Xiph gitlab theora instance and you can fetch it from the Theora home page as soon as someone with access find time to update the web pages. In the mean time (automatically removed after 14 days) the release tarball is also available as a git build artifact from…
When I a few days ago discovered that a security problem reported against the theora library last year was still not fixed, and because I was already up to speed on Xiph development, I decided it was time to wrap up a new theora release. This new release was tagged in the Xiph gitlab theora instance Saturday. You can fetch the new release from the Theora home page . The list of changes since The…
Since my motivation boost in the beginning of the month caused me to wrap up a new release of liboggz , I have used the same boost to wrap up new editions of libfishsound , liboggplay and libkate too. These have been tagged in upstream git, but not yet published on the Xiph download location. I am waiting for someone with access to have time to move the tarballs there, I hope it will happen in a…
It is a while since I posted a summary of the free software and open culture activities and projects I have worked on. Here is a quick summary of the major ones from last year. I guess the biggest project of the year has been migrating orphaned packages in Debian without a version control system to have a git repository on salsa.debian.org. When I started in April around 450 the orphaned packages…
A little over a week ago, I noticed the liboggz package on my Debian dashboard had not had a new upstream release for a while. A closer look showed that its last release, version 1.1.1, happened in 2010. A few patches had accumulated in the Debian package, and I even noticed that I had passed on these patches to upstream five years ago. A handful crash bugs had been reported against the Debian…
For some years now, I have been working on a automatic hardware based package recommendation system for Debian and other Linux distributions. The isenkram system I started on back in 2013 now consist of two subsystems, one locating firmware files using the information provided by apt-file, and one matching hardware to packages using information provided by AppStream. The former is very similar to…
Seven and twelve years ago, I measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was , first by analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive, then by analysing the DEP-11 AppStream data set. I guess it is time to repeat the measurement, only for unstable as last time: Debian Unstable: count MIME type ----- ----------------------- 63 image/png 63 image/jpeg 57 image/tiff 54…
The LinuxCNC project is trotting along. And I believe this great software system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and hexapods, would do even better with more in-person developer gatherings, so we plan to organise such gathering this summer too. This year we would like to invite to a small LinuxCNC and free…
The rumors of the death of the lsdvd project is slightly exaggerated. And the last few months, we have been working on fixing and improving it, culminating in a new release last night. This is the list of changes in the new 0.18 release, as announced on the project mailing list : Simplified autoconf setup, dropped --enable-debug option. Improved video resolution reporting ( Fixes #8 ). Applied…
In April , I started migrating orphaned Debian packages without any version control system listed in debian/control to git. This morning, my Debian QA page finally reached 200 QA packages migrated. In reality there are a few more, as the packages uploaded by someone else after my initial upload have disappeared from my QA uploads list. As I am running out of steam and will most likely focus on…
The Norwegian The LinuxCNC developer gathering 2024 is over. It was a great and productive weekend, and I am sad that it is over. Regular readers probably still remember what LinuxCNC is, but her is a quick summary for those that forgot? LinuxCNC is a free software system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and…
The LinuxCNC project is still going strong. And I believe this great software system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and hexapods, would do even better with more in-person developer gatherings, so we plan to organise such gathering this summer too. The Norwegian LinuxCNC developer gathering take place the weekend…
Nine days ago, I started migrating orphaned Debian packages with no version control system listed in debian/control of the source to git. At the time there were 438 such packages. Now there are 391, according to the UDD. In reality it is slightly less, as there is a delay between uploads and UDD updates. In the nine days since, I have thus been able to work my way through ten percent of the…
I am happy to report that the megactl package , useful to fetch RAID status when using the LSI Megaraid controller, now is available in Debian. It passed NEW a few days ago, and is now available in unstable , and probably showing up in testing in a weeks time. The new version should provide Appstream hardware mapping and should integrate nicely with isenkram. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want…
There are several packages in Debian without a associated git repository with the packaging history. This is unfortunate and it would be nice if more of these would do so. Quote a lot of these are without a maintainer, ie listed as maintained by the ' Debian QA Group ' place holder. In fact, 438 packages have this property according to UDD ( SELECT source FROM sources WHERE release = 'sid' AND…
A while back I wrote a small script to extract the Bitcoin transactions in a wallet in the ledger plain text accounting format . The last few days I spent some time to get it working better with more special cases. In case it can be useful for others, here is a copy: #!/usr/bin/python3 # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # Copyright (c) 2023-2024 Petter Reinholdtsen from decimal import Decimal import json…
The last few days I have revisited RAID setup using the LSI Megaraid controller. These are a family of controllers called PERC by Dell, and is present in several old PowerEdge servers, and I recently got my hands on one of these. I had forgotten how to handle this RAID controller in Debian, so I had to take a peek in the Debian wiki page "Linux and Hardware RAID: an administrator's summary" to…
Today, the animation figure Mickey Mouse finally was released from the corporate copyright prison, as the 1928 movie Steamboat Willie entered the public domain in USA. This movie was the first public appearance of Mickey Mouse. Sadly the figure is still on probation, thanks to trademark laws and a the Disney corporations powerful pack of lawyers, as described in the 2017 article in "How Mickey…
The other day I uploaded a new version of the VLC bittorrent plugin to Debian, version 2.14-4, to fix a few packaging issues. This plugin extend VLC allowing it to stream videos directly from a bittorrent source using both torrent files and magnet links, as easy as using a HTTP or local file source. I believe such protocol support is a vital feature in VLC, allowing efficient streaming from…
For a while now I wanted to have direct access to the Signal database of messages and channels of my Desktop edition of Signal. I prefer the enforced end to end encryption of Signal these days for my communication with friends and family, to increase the level of safety and privacy as well as raising the cost of the mass surveillance government and non-government entities practice these days. In…
The chrpath package provide a simple command line tool to remove or modify the rpath or runpath of compiled ELF program. It is almost 10 years since I updated the code base, but I stumbled over the tool today, and decided it was time to move the code base from Subversion to git and find a new home for it, as the previous one (Debian Alioth) has been shut down. I decided to go with Codeberg this…
All the books I have published so far has been using DocBook somewhere in the process. For the first book, the source format was DocBook, while for every later book it was an intermediate format used as the stepping stone to be able to present the same manuscript in several formats, on paper, as ebook in ePub format, as a HTML page and as a PDF file either for paper production or for Internet…
I still enjoy Kodi and LibreELEC as my multimedia center at home. Sadly two of the services I really would like to use from within Kodi are not easily available. The most wanted add-on would be one making The Internet Archive available, and it has not been working for many years. The second most wanted add-on is one using the Invidious privacy enhanced Youtube frontent . A plugin for this has been…
With yesterdays release of Debian 12 Bookworm , I am happy to know the the interactive application firewall OpenSnitch is available for a wider audience. I have been running it for a few weeks now, and have been surprised about some of the programs connecting to the Internet. Some programs are obviously calling out from my machine, like the NTP network based clock adjusting system and Tor to reach…
There is a European standard for reading utility meters like water, gas, electricity or heat distribution meters. The Meter-Bus standard (EN 13757-2, EN 13757-3 and EN 13757–4) provide a cross vendor way to talk to and collect meter data. I ran into this standard when I wanted to monitor some heat distribution meters, and managed to find free software that could do the job. The meters in question…
The LinuxCNC project is making headway these days. A lot of patches and issues have seen activity on the project github pages recently. A few weeks ago there was a developer gathering over at the Tormach headquarter in Wisconsin, and now we are planning a new gathering in Norway. If you wonder what LinuxCNC is, lets quote Wikipedia: "LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of machines…
A bit delayed, the interactive application firewall OpenSnitch package in Debian now got the latest fixes ready for Debian Bookworm. Because it depend on a package missing on some architectures, the autopkgtest check of the testing migration script did not understand that the tests were actually working, so the migration was delayed. A bug in the package dependencies is also fixed, so those…
While visiting a convention during Easter, it occurred to me that it would be great if I could have a digital Dictaphone with transcribing capabilities, providing me with texts to cut-n-paste into stuff I need to write. The background is that long drives often bring up the urge to write on texts I am working on, which of course is out of the question while driving. With the release of OpenAI…
Today I finally found time to track down a useful radio frequency scanner for my software defined radio. Just for fun I tried to locate the radios used in the areas, and a good start would be to scan all the frequencies to see what is in use. I've tried to find a useful program earlier, but ran out of time before I managed to find a useful tool. This time I was more successful, and after a few…
Thanks to the efforts of the OpenSnitch lead developer Gustavo Iñiguez Goya allowing me to sponsor the upload, the interactive application firewall OpenSnitch is now available in Debian Testing, soon to become the next stable release of Debian. This is a package which set up a network firewall on one or more machines, which is controlled by a graphical user interface that will ask the user if a…
Linux desktop systems have standardized how programs present themselves to the desktop system. If a package include a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications/, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Xfce and the other desktop environments will pick up the file and use its content to generate the menu of available programs in the system. A lesser known fact is that a package can also explain to the desktop system how…
While reading a blog post claiming MacOS X recently started scanning local files and reporting information about them to Apple , even on a machine where all such callback features had been disabled, I came across a description of the Little Snitch application for MacOS X. It seemed like a very nice tool to have in the tool box, and I decided to see if something similar was available for Linux. It…
I watched a 2015 video from Andreas Schiffler the other day, where he set up LinuxCNC to send status information to the MQTT broker IBM Bluemix. As I also use MQTT for graphing, it occured to me that a generic MQTT LinuxCNC component would be useful and I set out to implement it. Today I got the first draft limping along and submitted as a patch to the LinuxCNC project . The simple part was…
Merry Christmas to you all. Here is a small gift to all those with IP cameras following the ONVIF specification . There is finally a nice command line and GUI tool in Debian to manage ONVIF IP cameras. After working with upstream for a few months and sponsoring the upload, I am very happy to report that the libonvif package entered Debian Sid last night. The package provide a C library to…
Recently I have been looking at how to control and collect data from a handful IP cameras using Linux. I both wanted to change their settings and to make their imagery available via a free software service under my control. Here is a summary of the tools I found. First I had to identify the cameras and their protocols. As far as I could tell, they were using some SOAP looking protocol and their…
(The picture is of the previous edition.) Almost two years after the previous Norwegian Bokmål translation of the " The Debian Administrator's Handbook " was published, a new edition is finally being prepared. The english text is updated, and it is time to start working on the translations. Around 37 percent of the strings have been updated, one way or another, and the translations starting from a…
While working on a CNC with servo motors controlled by the LinuxCNC PID controller , I recently had to learn how to tune the collection of values that control such mathematical machinery that a PID controller is. It proved to be a lot harder than I hoped, and I still have not succeeded in getting the Z PID controller to successfully defy gravity, nor X and Y to move accurately and reliably. But…
I guess it is time to bring some light on the various free software and open culture activities and projects I have worked on or been involved in the last year and a half. First, lets mention the book releases I managed to publish . The Cory Doctorow book "Hvordan knuse overvåkningskapitalismen" argue that it is not the magic machine learning of the big technology companies that causes the…
Back in oktober last year, when I started looking at the LinuxCNC system, I proposed to change the documentation build system make life easier for translators. The original system consisted of independently written documentation files for each language, with no automated way to track changes done in other translations and no help for the translators to know how much was left to translated. By…
Recently I wanted to upgrade the firmware of my thinkpad, and located the firmware download page from Lenovo (which annoyingly do not allow access via Tor, forcing me to hand them more personal information that I would like). The download from Lenovo is a bootable ISO image, which is a bit of a problem when all I got available is a USB memory stick. I tried booting the ISO as a USB stick, but this…
Inspired by the recent news of AV1 hardware encoding support from Intel , I decided to look into the state of AV1 on Linux today. AV1 is a free and open standard as defined by Digistan without any royalty payment requirement, unlike its much used competitor encoding H.264. While looking, I came across an 5 year old question on askubuntu.com which in turn inspired me to check out how things are in…