2025-05-10 00:20:50
Those of us who have spent our lives playing with computers naturally see the appeal of deploying them though the home for both data acquisition and automation. But many of us who have watched the evolution of the technology industry are increasingly unwilling to entrust critical household functions to cloud-based servers run by companies that may not have our best interests at heart. The Apache-licensed Home Assistant project offers a welcome alternative: locally controlled automation with free software. This two-part series covers roughly a year of Home Assistant use, starting with a set of overall observations about the project.
2025-05-09 23:49:42
Lance Albertson writes that the Oregon State University Open Source Lab has been funded for the next year, following his announcement in April that the future of OSL was in jeopardy. OSL is now focusing on becoming self-sustainable long term.
The recent support was amazing for our immediate team needs. But for the OSL to thrive long-term, we need a sustainable financial foundation. This is crucial, as the university expects units like ours to become self-sufficient beyond this current year.
So, our big focus this next year is locking in ongoing support – think annualized pledges, different kinds of regular income, and other recurring help. This is vital, especially with potential new data center costs and hardware needs. Getting this right means we can stop worrying about short-term funding and plan for the future: investing in our tech and people, growing our awesome student programs, and serving the FOSS community. We're looking for partners, big and small, who get why foundational open source infrastructure matters and want to help us build this sustainable future together.
2025-05-09 22:23:37
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.14.6, 6.12.28, 6.6.90, 6.1.138, and 5.15.182 stable kernel versions.
2025-05-09 21:34:20
Security updates have been issued by Debian (fossil, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, and request-tracker4), Fedora (thunderbird), Mageia (firefox and thunderbird), SUSE (389-ds, apparmor, cargo-c, chromium, go1.24, govulncheck-vulndb, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kanidm, libsoup, mozjs102, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, python-Django, sccache, tealdeer, tomcat, transfig, wasm-bindgen, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (libreoffice and python-h11).
2025-05-09 21:10:37
The GNOME Foundation has announced the hiring of Steven Deobald as its new executive director.
Steven has been a GNOME user since 2002 and has been involved in numerous free software initiatives throughout his career. His professional background spans technical leadership, cooperative business development, and nonprofit work. Having worked with projects like XTDB and Endatabas, he brings valuable experience in open source product development. Based in Halifax, Canada, Steven is well-positioned to collaborate with our global community across time zones.
2025-05-09 03:58:59
The famfs filesystem is meant to provide a shared-memory filesystem for large data sets that are accessed for computations by multiple systems. It was developed by John Groves, who led a combined filesystem and memory-management session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) to discuss it. The session was a follow-up to the famfs session at last year's summit, but it was also meant to discuss whether the kernel's direct-access (DAX) mechanism, which is used by famfs, could be replaced in the filesystem by using other kernel features.