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 multimedia related libraries published via
Xiph, and I decided to wrap up the
current state and make the releases myself. In a burst of activity
early this year, I collected and tested patches, coordinated with
other developers and finally made new tarballs and release
announcement for
theora, and
new tarball releases for
liboggz,
kate and
fishsound.
This upstreamed several patches accumulated in Debian and other Linux
distributions for the last 15 years or so.
To change the world and the future, it is important to start with the
kids, and one such avenue of change have been created by the current
president of FSF Europe, Matthias Kirschner. He wrote a book for
children,
Ada & Zangemann, and I
have been involved in its translation framework for the entire year.
The source code has been transformed to
Docbook and I have been conducting
and coordinating translations into Norwegian Bokm l and Nynorsk, as
well as preparing paper editions of the book and an animation
movie with Norwegian voices. The Bokm l edition is very close to
ready, and will be available early in 2026, and the movie release will
follow shortly after this. I intend announce this on my blog and
elsewhere when this happen. Please get in touch if you want to help
spread the word about this book in Norwegian. I hope we can get the
author to Norway when making the Norwegian releases.
This year I continued a push for the system I made a few years ago to
improve hardware dongle handling on Linux. The
Isenkram system use
hardware mapping information provided by relevant packages using the
AppStream system to propose which Linux distribution packages to
install on a given machine to support dongles like cameras, finger
print readers, smart card readers, LEGO controllers, ECC memory and
other hardware. I have followed up on the list of packages providing
such mapping, either to get it into Debian or to upstream the
necessary metadata. I am not sure if we are at a point where package
maintainers on their own add such information to their packages, but
there are
Debian
lintian reports suggesting it and I have
send
patches to all packages I am aware of that should include such
mappings. Most of the patches are included in Debian now, only 27 was
left the last time I checked.
As part of my involvement with Debian, I continued my push to get
all orphaned packages without a version control repository migrated to
git. I am not sure how many packages I went through, but it was in the
range of 200-300 packages. In addition to this I updated, sponsored,
pushed maintainers for updates
upstreamed patches for and fixed RC issues with
battery-stats,
bs1770gain,
isenkram,
libonvif,
mfiutil,
opensnitch,
simplescreenrecorder,
vlc-plugin-bittorrent
and
wakeonlan. I've
also followed up LEGO related packages, dahdi support for Asterisk,
llama.cpp and whisper.cpp in particular for the AMD GPU I was donated
by AMD, as well as tried yet again to convince the upstream developers
of the
photogrammetric
workstion e-foto to get their program into a state that could be
included in Debian.
As I do not buy into the story that it is great to expose oneself to
the whims of and priorities of commercial entities to have access to
cultural expressions like films and music, I still maintain a huge
collection of movies. For this to work well, I have ended up as part
of the people maintaining
lsdvd upstream and
wrapped up a new release fixing several crash bugs caused by DVDs with
intentionally broken metadata, and introduced code to list a DVD ID in
the lsdvd output. Related to this, I have also worked some add-ons
for my main video and music player, and took over upstream maintenance
of the
Invidious
add-on, which sadly stopped working for non-authenticated users
when web scrapers made it impossible for Invidious installations to
provide a open API, as well as contributed to the
NRK and
projector
control add-ons.
As part of my involvement in the Norwegian archiving community and
standardisation work, we organised a Noark 5 workshop this spring
discussing
how
to decide what to keep and what to delete in digital archives. We
finally managed to apply for Noark 5 certification for the free
software archive API
Nikita,
as well as worked to test and improve the performance of Nikita
together with people on my day job at the university.
Manufacturing using Free Software is still a focus for me, and I
have continued my involved with
the
LinuxCNC community, organising a developer gathering this summer
with the help and sponsoring from the initial start in 2023 from
NUUG Foundation and sponsoring
from
Debian and
Redpill-Linpro. We
plan to repeat the event also in 2026, but this time NUUG Foundation
have told us they do not want a role, so we have found another
friendly organisation to handle the money.
A popular machine controller with LinuxCNC is the MESA set of
electronics, which is centred around a FPGA which now can be
programmed using only Free Software. We discussed during this summers
gathering how hard it would be to compile the current FPGA source
using a Free Software tool chain, and I started looking into this,
locating tools to transform the VHDL source into something the Yosys
tool chain can handle. Still lot to do there, and I hope to get
further next year.
An important part of Free Software manufacturing is the ability to
design parts and create programs that can be passed to machines making
parts, also known as CAD/CAM. The most prominent project for this is
FreeCAD, and I have been both
pushing to get opencamlib integrated with it in Debian as well as
fixing bugs in the handling of Fanuc controlled machines, do make it
easier to generate instructions for machines I have access to. I
expect to also continue this also next year.
This year the UN conference Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was
held in Norway, and I tried my best to get a stand for the Norwegian
Unix Users Group (NUUG) there. Sadly the effort failed, due to lack
of interest with the NUUG Board, but I was happy to see several
members at least attend some of the activities related to IGF. Sadly
to participate at IGF one need to hand over quite private information,
so I decided not to participate in any of the closed forum events
myself. Related to NUUG I have been a member of the election board
proposing board member candidates to the general assembly, and been
part of the program committee of the
"
Big Tech m
vekk" (Big Tech must go away) festival organised by Attac in
concert with NUUG and EFN. I've also assisted the Norwegian open TV
channel
Frikanalen with access to
their machines located in a machine room at the university.
Related to the University, I have become involved in a
small
team of students working to build and program robots for the
Robocup@Home competition. For 2026 we also plan to use the new features of
FreeCAD to make parts for the open hardware robot arm
OpenArm. This is also the group
that will handle the money for the LinuxCNC gathering in 2026. Also
related to the university I was looking into the Linux security
auditing system Falco earlier this year, making improvements to the
detection rules. This activity is on hold at the moment, and do not
expect to continue with this in 2026.
I will most likely have to cut down a bit on my free software and
open culture activities going forward, as NUUG Foundation, who have
funded one day a week for such activities for several years no, sadly
have decided they do not want to continue doing this. I am very
grateful for their contributions over the years, both with freeing up
time for me and supporting several events and projects where I have
been involved or taken the initiative on. Now they are reorganizing
with more focus on paperwork and applications.
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
The Debian LTS Team, funded by 
Drilling into an individual test gives you its full run history, a
duration sparkline, and per-run pass/fail status:
The AI hype is based on the assumption that the frontier AI labs are producing better and better foundational models at an accelerating pace. Is that really true, or are people just in sort of a mass psychosis because AI models have become so good at mimicking human behavior that we unconsciously attribute increasing intelligence to them? I decided to conduct a mini-benchmark of my own to find out if the latest and greatest AI models are actually really good or not.
Common for all the test questions is that they are fairly straightforward and have a clear answer, yet the answer isn t common knowledge or statistically the most obvious one, and instead requires a bit of reasoning to get correct.
Some of these questions are also based on myself witnessing a flagship model failing miserably to answer it.
While Gemini and Grok were among the three models not falling into this trap, the response from Claude was exemplary good:
I have seen Grok do something similar before, which in fact inspired me to include this question in my mini-benchmark.
GPT got a bit further, but for Hindi, Arabic and Bengali it listed the numerals in local script, not the number words. Gemini, GLM and Kimi gave a complete and correct answer as a list, while the absolute best answer and presentation was by Claude, that gave the table below:
A human can easily count that there are 10 rows and 30+ columns in the grid, but because the picture resolution isn t good enough, the exact number of columns can t be counted, and the answer should be that there are at least 300 launch pads in the picture.
GPT and Grok both guessed the count is zero. Instead of hallucinating some number they say zero, but it would have been better to not give any number at all, and just state that they are unable to perform the task. Gemini gave as its answer 101 , which is quite odd, but reading the reasoning section, it seems to have tried counting items in the image without reasoning much about what it is actually counting and that there is clearly a grid that can make the counting much easier. Both Qwen and Kimi state they can see four parallel structures, but are unable to count drone launch pads.
The absolutely best answer was given by Claude, which counted 10-12 rows and 30-40+ columns, and concluded that there must be 300-500 drone launch pads. Very close to best human level - impressive!
This question applied only to multi-modal models that can see images, so GLM and MinMax could not give any response.
has featured the
If you care about supporting open source software, and still use MySQL in 2026, you should switch to MariaDB like so many others have already done.
The number of git commits on 
Due to newer MySQL versions deprecating many features, a lot of users also complained about significant struggles regarding both MySQL 5.7->8.0 and 8.0->8.4 upgrades. With few new features and heavy focus on code base cleanup and feature deprecation, it became obvious to many that Oracle had decided to just keep MySQL barely alive, and put all new relevant features (e.g. vector search) into Heatwave, Oracle s closed-source and cloud-only service for MySQL customers.
As it was evident that Oracle isn t investing in MySQL, Percona s Peter Zaitsev wrote 
In September 2025 
I am a huge fan of Git, as I have witnessed how it has made software development so much more productive compared to the pre-2010s era. I wish all Debian source code were in Git to reap the full benefits.
Git is not perfect, as it requires significant effort to learn properly, and the ecosystem is complex with even more things to learn ranging from cryptographic signatures and commit hooks to Git-assisted code review best practices, forge websites, and CI systems.
Sure, there is still room to optimize its use, but Git certainly has proven itself and is now the industry standard. Thus, some readers might be surprised to learn that Debian development in 2025 is not actually based on Git. In Debian, the version control is done by the Debian archive itself. Each commit is a new upload to the archive, and the commit message is the 
The discovery of a backdoor in XZ Utils in the spring of 2024 shocked the open source community, raising critical questions about software supply chain security. This post explores whether better Debian packaging practices could have detected this threat, offering a guide to auditing packages and suggesting future improvements.
The XZ backdoor in versions 5.6.0/5.6.1 made its way briefly into many major Linux distributions such as Debian and Fedora, but luckily didn t reach that many actual users, as the backdoored releases were quickly removed thanks to the heroic diligence of 
If the changes are extensive, and you want to use a LLM to help spot potential security issues, generate the report of both the upstream and Debian packaging differences in Markdown with:
To compare changes across the new and old upstream tarball, one would need to compare commits afba662b New upstream version 5.8.0 and fa1e8796 New upstream version 5.8.1 by running 
With all the above tips you can now go and try to audit your own favorite package in Debian and see if it is identical with upstream, and if not, how it differs.
There is only one tiny thing that maybe a very experienced Autotools user could potentially have noticed: the 
Historically the primary way to contribute to Debian has been to email the Debian bug tracker with a code patch. Now that 
Following the Browse link opens the Debian package source repository, which is usually a project page on Salsa. To contribute, start by clicking the Fork button, select your own personal namespace and, under Branches to include, pick Only the default branch to avoid including unnecessary temporary development branches.
Once forking is complete, 
It may also be good to build the source package to establish a baseline of the current state and what kind of binaries and 
When you see a new Merge Request, try to review it within a couple of days. If you cannot review in a reasonable time, posting a small note that you intend to review it later will feel better to the submitter compared to not getting any response.
Personally, I have a habit of assigning myself as a reviewer so that I can keep track of my whole review queue at 
When adding the first comment, I choose Start review and for the following remarks Add to review. Finally, I click Finish review and Submit review, which will trigger one single email to the submitter with all my feedback. I try to avoid using the Add comment now option, as each such comment triggers a separate notification email to the submitter.
Welcome to post 49 in the