Petter Reinholdtsen: Some of my 2025 free software activities

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 Bokmål and Nynorsk, as
well as preparing paper editions of the book and an animation
movie with Norwegian voices. The Bokmål 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 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 må
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.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.