- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

We Asked LibreOffice and Collabora: Why Aren’t They in Schools Instead of Word and Google Docs?
by Peter Reutemann 30 Sep '25

30 Sep '25

'Much free and open source software helps its users save money as possible — on both hardware and software — while protecting their privacy. It also often makes it easy for them to learn how it works — if they’re interested — and customize it in any way they want or need. With such features, FOSS should be the default choice in any educational environment, in these days when many schools face budget cuts, and switching to “free as in free beer” proprietary cloud applications like Microsoft Teams or Google Docs to save money has the consequence of actively preparing and educating pupils to be endless sources of data to be exploited for the likes of money and political control. That being true, how come so many schools and universities still accept — if not demand — that their students use only proprietary software and clouds? How come so many taxpayer dollars allocated for public education ends up being used to make the likes of Microsoft and Google even richer? Saving money can’t be the only answer — especially in the long term. [...] In my experience, besides ignorance and resistance to change, the main reasons why too many schools still don’t use LibreOffice and Collabora Online in 2025 are, in no particular order: - Money - Already established supply chains - Teacher overload - Isolation - Cloud computing - Improper formatting choices' -- source: https://fossforce.com/2025/09/we-asked-libreoffice-and-collabora-why-arent-… Cheers, Peter

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Ubuntu 25.10 Switches to Dracut as Default Initramfs Tool
by Peter Reutemann 30 Sep '25

30 Sep '25

'The big news came from the Canonical camp. Ubuntu developers have officially approved a long-planned move affecting a fundamental system component: starting with Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka,” the distro will switch from initramfs-tools to Dracut as its default initramfs generation tool. For readers who aren’t too tech-savvy, I will immediately clarify that the initramfs is the temporary root filesystem the Linux kernel uses at boot. It contains the drivers and scripts needed to mount the actual system and get everything running. And just for reference, Ubuntu has relied on initramfs-tools for nearly two decades. Surprising to many or not, Dracut was originally developed in the Fedora/Red Hat ecosystem. What makes it stand out is that, instead of relying on big sets of custom shell scripts, it builds the initramfs image using small, reusable modules. This modular design makes it easier to maintain, more consistent across different Linux distros, and often faster to update.' -- source: https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-25-10-switches-to-dracut-as-default-initramfs-t… Cheers, Peter

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Meta Learned The Wrong Lesson From Frances Haugen
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Sep '25

12 Sep '25

Remember when Frances Haugen came forward in 2021 to reveal that Facebook/Meta knew it was causing harm to underage users, but didn’t seem keen to do anything about it <https://www.theverge.com/policy/775623/meta-whistleblowers-hearing-virtual-…>? The company did make changes as a result of that revelation, but they were the wrong kind of changes: instead of actually fixing the problem of underage harm, it decided to stop collecting the data that revealed that harm. It has restricted researchers’ access, and threatened the jobs of those who wanted to gather data on “forbidden” topics.

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FFmpeg 8.0 “Huffman” Released with AV1 Vulkan Encoder, VVC VA-API Decoding
by Peter Reutemann 04 Sep '25

04 Sep '25

'FFmpeg 8.0 has been released today as a major update to this open-source multimedia framework that introduces numerous features, including new decoders, as well as various improvements. Dubbed “Huffman” and coming more than ten months after FFmpeg 7.1, the FFmpeg 8.0 release is here to enable TLS peer certificate verification by default, add an AV1 Vulkan encoder, introduce VP9 Vulkan and ProRes RAW Vulkan hardware-acceleration, and implement APV encoding support through a libopenapv wrapper. FFmpeg 8.0 also introduces animated JPEG XL encoding via the libjxl library, adds multitrack audio/video and modern codec support to FLV v2, adds VVC (Versatile Video Coding) support in Matroska (MKV), and adds VVC decoder support to all SCC (Screen Content Coding) content, including IBC (Inter Block Copy), Palette Mode, and ACT (Adaptive Color Transform). Several new filters are present in this release, including a Whisper filter, a pad_cuda filter, a Colordetect filter, and a vf_scale_d3d11 filter. New decoders are here as well, including a VVC VA-API decoder, a RealVideo 6.0 decoder, an ADPCM IMA Xbox decoder, a G.728 decoder, a Sanyo LD-ADPCM decoder, and a ProRes RAW decoder. On top of that, FFmpeg 8.0 brings libx265 alpha layer encoding, CENC AV1 support in the MP4 muxer, an APV decoder, along with APV raw bitstream muxing and demuxing support, an APV parser, APV support for MP4/ISOBMFF muxing and demuxing, as well as an OpenHarmony hardware decoder and encoder. Among other noteworthy changes, FFmpeg 8.0 drops support for OpenSSL 1.1.0 and previous versions, no longer disables GCC autovectorization on x86, ARM, and AArch64 (ARM64) architectures, sets the default prediction method for pngenc to PAETH, deprecates OpenMAX encoders, and drops yasm support in favor of nasm.' -- source: https://9to5linux.com/ffmpeg-8-0-huffman-released-with-av1-vulkan-encoder-v… The "Whisper filter" would be used for automatically generating sub-titles: https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-Lands-Whisper I've used whisper before and it is quite impressive. Cheers, Peter

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FreeBSD Project Isn't Ready To Let AI Commit Code Just Yet
by Peter Reutemann 04 Sep '25

04 Sep '25

'The latest status report from the FreeBSD Project says no thanks to code generated by LLM-based assistants. From a report: The FreeBSD Project's Status Report for the second quarter of 2025 contains updates from various sub-teams that are working on improving the FreeBSD OS, including separate sub-projects such as enabling FreeBSD apps to run on Linux, Chinese translation efforts, support for Solaris-style Extended Attributes, and for Apple's legacy HFS+ file system. The thing that stood out to us, though, was that the core team is working on what it terms a "Policy on generative AI created code and documentation." The relevant paragraph says: "Core is investigating setting up a policy for LLM/AI usage (including but not limited to generating code). The result will be added to the Contributors Guide in the doc repository. AI can be useful for translations (which seems faster than doing the work manually), explaining long/obscure documents, tracking down bugs, or helping to understand large code bases. We currently tend to not use it to generate code because of license concerns. The discussion continues at the core session at BSDCan 2025 developer summit, and core is still collecting feedback and working on the policy."' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/09/03/1649201 Cheers, Peter

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Are AI Web Crawlers 'Destroying Websites' In Their Hunt for Training Data?
by Peter Reutemann 01 Sep '25

01 Sep '25

Hi everyone I thought this news item rather fitting when I saw it this morning, considering Daniel's experience with these AI bots hammering the wlug wiki: '"AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model mills," argues Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at the Register. And "when AI searchbots, with Meta (52% of AI searchbot traffic), Google (23%), and OpenAI (20%) leading the way, clobber websites with as much as 30 Terabits in a single surge, they're damaging even the largest companies' site performance..." How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots... Anyone who runs a website, though, knows there's a huge, honking difference between the old-style crawlers and today's AI crawlers. The new ones are site killers. Fastly warns that they're causing "performance degradation, service disruption, and increased operational costs." Why? Because they're hammering websites with traffic spikes that can reach up to ten or even twenty times normal levels within minutes. Moreover, AI crawlers are much more aggressive than standard crawlers. As the InMotionhosting web hosting company notes, they also tend to disregard crawl delays or bandwidth-saving guidelines and extract full page text, and sometimes attempt to follow dynamic links or scripts. The result? If you're using a shared server for your website, as many small businesses do, even if your site isn't being shaken down for content, other sites on the same hardware with the same Internet pipe may be getting hit. This means your site's performance drops through the floor even if an AI crawler isn't raiding your website... AI crawlers don't direct users back to the original sources. They kick our sites around, return nothing, and we're left trying to decide how we're to make a living in the AI-driven web world. Yes, of course, we can try to fend them off with logins, paywalls, CAPTCHA challenges, and sophisticated anti-bot technologies. You know one thing AI is good at? It's getting around those walls. As for robots.txt files, the old-school way of blocking crawlers? Many — most? — AI crawlers simply ignore them... There are efforts afoot to supplement robots.txt with llms.txt files. This is a proposed standard to provide LLM-friendly content that LLMs can access without compromising the site's performance. Not everyone is thrilled with this approach, though, and it may yet come to nothing. In the meantime, to combat excessive crawling, some infrastructure providers, such as Cloudflare, now offer default bot-blocking services to block AI crawlers and provide mechanisms to deter AI companies from accessing their data. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/31/1820249 Cheers, Peter

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WLUG Wiki -- “Service Unavailable”?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Aug '25

30 Aug '25

I was checking a link on the WLUG Wiki <https://wiki.wlug.org.nz/>, but it is currently returning “503 Service Unavailable”. I hope this is temporary ...

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Bottles Project Receives EU-Backed Grant
by Peter Reutemann 18 Aug '25

18 Aug '25

'Over the past year, the Bottles project, a popular compatibility layer for running Windows software on Linux, has hit a bit of a rough patch, with financial struggles putting a serious damper on its development progress. It got to a point where, as we informed you back in early July, lead developer Mirko Brombin shared an honest update about the project’s tough financial situation and called on the open source community for support. Thankfully, that call didn’t go unheard—and now, it looks like those financial worries are behind them. The project secured a grant from the NLnet Foundation through its 2025 Commons Fund. This funding is a big deal, as it’ll help speed up development on Bottles Next, the project’s ambitious effort to deliver a sleeker, more modern experience for handling Windows apps in Linux environments.' -- source: https://linuxiac.com/bottles-project-receives-eu-backed-grant/ I had never heard of this project before today. Here is some more background: https://docs.usebottles.com/faq/why-bottles Cheers, Peter

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Useful Commands Beginning With “ls”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Aug '25

14 Aug '25

The “ls” command for listing directory contents has inspired a whole range of commands for listing other kinds of information. Here are a few I found in a quick search on my system: lsblk -- show block devices (disks, SSDs, SD cards, USB sticks etc). lscpu -- show information about your CPUs lsfd -- show information about open files (successor to lsof) lshw -- show detailed hardware information lsipc -- show state of Inter-Process Communication structures (message queues, shared memory, semaphores) lsirq -- show information about kernel hardware interrupt handling lslocks -- show information about filesystem locks lslogins -- show information about user IDs associated with processes on the system. This is not just regular user logins, but also user IDs allocated to system processes. lsmem -- show information about physical memory known to the kernel lsmod -- show state of loaded kernel modules lspci -- show information about PCI buses and connected devices. This will commonly include a lot of motherboard hardware, not just that in expansion slots. lsusb -- show information about connected USB devices. I think all these are from the util-linux package, which should be installed by default. Oh, and a bonus one that has nothing to do with system info as such: lsar -- handy tool for displaying the contents of various formats of archives, such as .zip, .tar and .7z files. Part of the “unar” package. Relevant manual pages (if these are not on your system): https://manpages.debian.org/lsblk(8) https://manpages.debian.org/lscpu(1) https://manpages.debian.org/lsfd(1) https://manpages.debian.org/lshw(1) https://manpages.debian.org/lsipc(1) https://manpages.debian.org/lsirq(1) https://manpages.debian.org/lslocks(8) https://manpages.debian.org/lslogins(1) https://manpages.debian.org/lsmem(1) https://manpages.debian.org/lsmod(8) https://manpages.debian.org/lspci(8) https://manpages.debian.org/lsusb(8) https://manpages.debian.org/lsar(1)

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Bye-Bye Dialup USA
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Aug '25

10 Aug '25

US-based ISP America On-Line (AOL) will finally turn off its dialup Internet service at the end of September <https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/network-providers/aol-will-e…>, ending 34 years of operation. AOL was the biggest ISP in the US back in dialup days, but somehow never made a successful transition to broadband service like everyone else. Another peculiarity was that, unlike ISPs everywhere else in the world who offered their dialup service via standard protocols like SLIP (early days) or PPP (the most common later), AOL always stuck to its own proprietary protocol. The company was also infamous for loosing vast numbers of its sign-up CDs on the world via magazines, free mailouts and so on, in an effort to drum up business. There were endless jokes about what to do with this deluge of unwanted AOL CDs.

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