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Fedora People

Misc fedora bits: third week of july 2025

Posted by Kevin Fenzi on 2025-07-20 00:08:32 UTC
Scrye into the crystal ball

Here's another saturday blog on interesting things that happened in fedora infrastructure in the last week.

Datacenter Move remnants

Cleanup and fixes have slowed down. There's a few outstanding items, but things are mostly all back to normal.

The new hardware is nicely fast: we are getting rawhide composes in about 1.5 hours (was a bit over 2 hours in the old datacenter).

We hope to enable ipv6 on a lot of services soon. There's a last bit of routing issue to clear up next week and then hopefully everything will be ready. See the infrastructure mailing list if you have ipv6 and would like to help us test things.

I moved our ppc64le builders to a iscsi lun from local nvme storage. All of them are on one power10 machine, and nvme is fast, but all 32 builders hitting just 4 nvme drives was still sometimes hitting io limitations. With the storage moved, they should be building a good deal faster now.

I'm trying to bring the machines we shipped from the old datacenter online now. They will be mostly adding builder capacity and openqa capacity. I'm not sure how many I will get before the mass rebuild starts next wed, but I think we are in reasonable shape in any case.

Yellow Glue of death

This past week twice the ups on my main machine and wireless ap and router started yelling about overload and stopped working. I am pretty sure it's the 'yellow glue of death' problem. Basically the vendor using a cheap yellow glue, and over time and with heat (it's been hot lately) it breaks down and starts shorting things out.

So, I ordered some new upses from a different vendor. I was supposed to get them both yesterday, but only one showed up for some reason. One is enough for now though, so I set it up and moved all my stuff over to it. Seems to work fine, nut monitors it fine, easy to add to home assistant. Even more loaded than I would like it's saying 43min runtime, which is fine. I basically just need it for short outages and to give me enough time to fire up the generator if it's a longer outage.

Fossy

Looks like I will be at https://2025.fossy.us/ week after next in portland. At least thursday, friday, saturday (I have to head home saturday). Lots of interesting talks, looking forward to it.

comments? additions? reactions?

As always, comment on mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@nirik/114882715277220537

Clear Linux - In Memoriam

Posted by Pavlo Rudy on 2025-07-19 17:35:47 UTC
Clear Linux - In Memoriam
Clear Linux logo (c) Intel Corporation
Clear Linux - In Memoriam

Do all good things come to an end? I disagree. However, reality can be brutal sometimes. Intel closed another open source project, Clear Linux OS, as announced in this thread. Can we say, "Big Evil Corp getting rid of open source"? Well, partially, at some point. Hopefully, Intel will continue to contribute to Linux and support Intel hardware, including CPUs, Intel Arc graphics cards, network cards, AI accelerators, and more.

There are rumors about mass layoffs at Intel, and sadly, the Clear Linux team is probably part of these layoffs. Nearly 20,000 people will be laid off, with around 5,000 of those being from the Clear Linux team. Despite the morale-boosting statement below, this raises big questions about Linux support for Intel products.

Rest assured that Intel remains deeply invested in the Linux ecosystem, actively supporting and contributing to various open-source projects and Linux distributions to enable and optimize for Intel hardware.

Only time will tell if it will actually happen. One thing we know for sure is that Clear Linux was a game changer in the Linux ecosystem. Like many Linux users, I first saw it on the Phoronix.com website, where it earned a decent benchmark score and outperformed many Linux distributions. Then, I tried the LiveCD on my laptop, and the difference from the installed Linux distribution was enormous—it was just like a new laptop! Other Linux distributions then adopted some performance optimizations because constantly losing in benchmarks definitely doesn't raise the project's reputation.

So, what else did Clear Linux do besides win the benchmarks? First, the performance and optimizations are important. It's not easy and it takes time. For some people, it's better to spend money on it. Many Linux distributions have invested in performance, including special builds for x86 microarchitectures.

The Clear Linux team patched software compilers, including GCC, and the Linux kernel, to improve performance. Some of these patches were adopted by other Linux distributions. They also widely used LTO (link-time optimization) and PGO (profile-guided optimization), which became more popular. The same happened with AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions), AVX2, AVX512 and beyond. The package manager, swupd, can identify the current CPU capabilities and download the optimal ELF files and libraries for optimal system performance.

The most interesting Clear Linux system design feature is probably stateless concept. "State" refers to user configuration or any non-default configuration applied. A real split between user data and configuration allows for the complete removal or replacement of the user configuration. In classical Linux distributions, with their mix of configuration files in the /etc directory, it is difficult to tell whether a configuration file is provided by default or not. The Clear Linux default /etc directory is empty, and the OS will boot successfully even if it is wiped. So, where is the default system configuration? In /usr/share/defaults. If an application cannot find its configuration file in /etc, it will be forced to load the default file from /usr. All files in /usr/, /lib/, /lib64/, /bin/, and /sbin/ are immutable because swupd will overwrite them with OS updates. The /usr/lib/modules/, /usr/lib/kernel/, /usr/local/, and /usr/src/ directories are whitelisted for kernel drivers and third-party software. There is no /etc/fstab by default; systemd can discover and mount all system partitions.

Clear Linux - In Memoriam

The Clear Linux installer is written from scratch in Go and GTK. It has a minimalist interface and supports manual and automatic installation, disk encryption, telemetry (which is disabled by default), network proxies, and more.

Clr-boot-manager is also written by Intel. The bootloader lacks BIOS support by design, but there's a workaround. The Clear Server edition can be loaded on non-UEFI machines thanks to Syslinux. Compared to the much larger Grub2, Clear is very easy to work with.
The kernel boot options should be defined in /etc/kernel/cmdline.d/*.conf, and these changes require the clr-boot-manager update command to become permanent. The complexity of the Grub2 architecture and its 10x larger codebase are probably the main reasons for giving up, along with the decreased boot time. /proc/rootfstype lists the supported file systems for the root partition, including ext4, btrfs, xfs, and f2fs. ZFS isn't supported, but an OpenZFS guide is available for non-root partitions.

Another notable project in Clear Linux is autospec - a highly automated tool for creating RPM packages from source code. It analyzes the source code and build system information, such as the Makefile. Then, it runs a build in a mock sandbox and suggests or adds fixes based on previous failures. For example, it can suggest adding a dependency. This tool can significantly speed up a maintainer's work.

Clear Linux has been discontinued but there's no reason to be sad or disappointed. The free and open-source software ecosystem sometimes acts similarly to space: when a star dies, some of its parts can become building materials for another star, asteroid, or even a planet. So, the Clear software and ideas have a chance to be applied to other Linux projects sooner or later.

Finally, there are other active Linux distributions for people interested in performance:

  • AerynOS, a revolutionary distribution created by Ikey Doherty, ex Clear Linux team member. Wildly improved a lot of Clear Linux ideas.
  • CachyOS, which is very optimized by performance adopted some Clear Linux patches, software and ideas, currently #1 on Distrowatch.com.
  • Bazzite, an OS optimized for gaming and everyday smoother and simpler use across desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs.

🎲 PHP version 8.3.24RC1 and 8.4.11RC1

Posted by Remi Collet on 2025-07-18 12:14:00 UTC

Release Candidate versions are available in the testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for parallel installation, the perfect solution for such tests, and as base packages.

RPMs of PHP version 8.4.11RC1 are available

  • as base packages in the remi-modular-test for Fedora 40-42 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8
  • as SCL in remi-test repository

RPMs of PHP version 8.3.24RC1 are available

  • as base packages in the remi-modular-test for Fedora 40-42 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8
  • as SCL in remi-test repository

ℹ️ The packages are available for x86_64 and aarch64.

ℹ️ PHP version 8.2 is now in security mode only, so no more RC will be released.

ℹ️ Installation: follow the wizard instructions.

ℹ️ Announcements:

Parallel installation of version 8.4 as Software Collection:

yum --enablerepo=remi-test install php84

Parallel installation of version 8.3 as Software Collection:

yum --enablerepo=remi-test install php83

Update of system version 8.4:

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.4
dnf --enablerepo=remi-modular-test update php\*

Update of system version 8.3:

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.3
dnf --enablerepo=remi-modular-test update php\*

ℹ️ Notice:

  • version 8.4.11RC1 is in Fedora rawhide for QA
  • version 8.5.0alpha2 is also available in the repository, as SCL
  • EL-10 packages are built using RHEL-10.0 and EPEL-10.0
  • EL-9 packages are built using RHEL-9.6
  • EL-8 packages are built using RHEL-8.10
  • oci8 extension uses the RPM of the Oracle Instant Client version 23.8 on x86_64 and aarch64
  • intl extension uses libicu 74.2
  • RC version is usually the same as the final version (no change accepted after RC, exception for security fix).
  • versions 8.3.23 and 8.4.9 are planed for July 31th, in 2 weeks.

Software Collections (php83, php84)

Base packages (php)

Infra and RelEng Update – Week 29

Posted by Fedora Community Blog on 2025-07-18 10:00:00 UTC

This is a weekly report from the I&R (Infrastructure & Release Engineering) Team. We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.

Week: 14 July – 18 July 2025

Infrastructure & Release Engineering

The purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work.
It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.).
List of planned/in-progress issues

Fedora Infra

CentOS Infra including CentOS CI

Release Engineering

If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on matrix.

The post Infra and RelEng Update – Week 29 appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

Oôssaca

Posted by Avi Alkalay on 2025-07-18 06:21:46 UTC

Esta enorme e importante cidade japonesa, no Brasil chamamos de “ozáca”, mas é pronuncia errada. O correto é “o-ô-ssaca”, com ênfase onde pus o acento mesmo.

A forma escrita que se popularizou é, na verdade, a transliteração para o inglês. Como, em português, usamos o mesmo alfabeto latino, acabamos adotando. Mas o correto em bom português, com proparoxítonas acentuadas, é assim:

Oôssaca

O-ô (大) significa muito, grande etc.

Tá faltando faladores nativos de japonês na minha vida prá me ensinarem essas coisas.

Também no Facebook e Instagram.

dnf-plugin-protected-kmods

Posted by Jonathan Dieter on 2025-07-16 21:35:41 UTC

<tldr>dnf-plugin-protected-kmods is now available in EPEL!</tldr>


I don’t think I ever posted about it, but nine months ago (exactly, which I just realized as I’m writing these words), I joined CIQ as a Senior Systems Engineer. One of my early tasks was to help one of our customers put together Rocky Linux images that their customers could use, and one of the requirements from their HPC customers was that the latest Intel irdma kernel module be available.

While packaging up the kernel module as an external kmod was easy enough, the question was asked, “What if the kernel ABI changes?” Their HPC customers wanted to use the upstream Rocky kernel, which, as a rebuild of RHEL has the same kABI guarantees that Red Hat has. There is a list of symbols that are (mostly) guaranteed not to change during a point release, but the Intel irdma driver requires symbols that aren’t in that list.

I did some investigation, and, in the lifespan of Rocky 8.10 (roughly 15 months), there have been somewhere just under 60 kernel releases, with only 3 or 4 breaking the symbols required by the Intel irdma driver. This meant that we could build the kmod when 8.10 came out, and, using weak-updates, the kernel module would automatically be available for newer kernels as they’re released until a release came out that broke one of the symbols that the kmod depended on. At that point, we would need to bump the release and rebuild the kmod. The new kmod build would be compatible with the new kernel, and any other new kernels until the kABI broke again.

When doing the original packaging for the kernel, Red Hat had the wisdom to add in a custom dependency generator that automatically generates a “Provides:” in the RPM for each symbol exported by the kernel, along with a hashed signature of its structure. This means that the kmod RPMs can be built to “Require:” each symbol they need, ensuring that the kmod can’t be installed on a system without also having a matching kernel installed.

This last item would seem to solve the whole “make sure kmods and kernels match” problem, except for one minor detail: You can have more than one kernel installed on your system.

Picture this. You have a system, and you install a kernel on it, and then install the Intel irdma/idpf driver, which makes your fancy network card work. A little while later, you update to the latest kernel and reboot… only to find your network card won’t work anymore!

What’s happened is that the kernel update changed one of the symbols required by the Intel irdma kmod, breaking the kABI. The kmod RPM has a dependency on the symbols it needs, but, because the kernel is special (that’s for you, Maple!), it’s one of the few packages that can have multiple versions installed at the same time, and those symbols are provided by the previous kernel, which is still installed, even if it’s not the currently booted kernel. The fix is as easy as booting back into the previous kernel, and waiting for an updated Intel kmod, but this is most definitely not a good customer experience.

What we really need is a safety net, a way to temporarily block the kernel from being updated until a matching kmod is available in the repositories. This is where dnf-plugin-protected-kmods comes in. When configured to protect a kmod, this DNF plugin will exclude any kernel RPMs if that kernel doesn’t have all the symbols required by the kmod RPM.

This means that, in the example above, the updated kernel would not have appeared as an available update until the Intel irdma/idpf kmod was also available (a warning would appear, indicating that this kernel was being blocked).

NVIDIA originally came up with the idea when they created yum-plugin-nvidia-driver, but it was very specifically designed with the NVIDIA kmods and their requirements in mind, so I forked it and made it more generic, updating it to filter based on the kernel’s “Provides:” and the kmod’s “Requires:”.

Our customer has been using this plugin for over six months, and it has functioned as expected. The DNF kmods we’re building for CIQ SIG/Cloud Next (a story for another day) are also built to support it and there’s a “Recommends:” dependency on it when the kmods are installed.

Since this plugin is useful not just to CIQ, but also to the wider Enterprise Linux community, I started working on packaging it up at this year’s Flock to Fedora conference (thanks for sending me, CIQ!), and, thanks to a review from Jonathan Wright (from AlmaLinux) with support from Neal Gompa, it’s now available in EPEL.

Note that there is no DNF 5 version available yet, and, given the lack of kABI guarantees in the Fedora kernel, it isn’t of much point in having it in Fedora proper.

And I do want to emphasize that, out of the box, the plugin doesn’t actually do anything. For it to protect a kmod, a drop-in configuration file is required as described in the documentation.

Simplifying Package Submission Progress (8 July – 15 July) – GSoC ’25

Posted by Fedora Community Blog on 2025-07-16 07:38:54 UTC

Hi, I am Mayank Singh, welcome back to this blog series on the progress of the new package submission prototype, if you aren’t familiar with the project, feel free to check out the previous blogpost here.

Event Handling, Forgejo Support, and Source Management (July 8 – July 15)

This week was focused on the service’s forge and tackling the challenge of source management.

Migrating to Forgejo and Handling Events

Based on community feedback, advantages and assessing our requirements, I moved the service’s forge to Forgejo. This minimal, open-source alternative to GitHub and GitLab is simpler to self-host and has significantly smoothed out our testing process.

On the implementation front, I added support for parsing issue and push events in packit-service, which allow to support parsing commands from issue comments. That being done adding support for pull_request is only trivial now and have a solid understanding of packit-service‘s event model to trigger task execution.

Package Source Handling

I hit a technical dilemma when considering handling the case of packages with new dependencies in a single Pull Request and handle their sources. The workflow requires accessing the PR’s diff, resolving it into individual files, and submitting those sources to be built in COPR.

My initial solution to this problem was to create a dedicated organization in Forgejo where every new package would get its own repository to store its sources. However, my mentor advised against this model, we discussed and realized it would become too complex and non-intuitive to work with. Instead, he clarified the path forward to focus on simple packages for now and investigate how Packit already solves this by cloning the source repository.

What’s Next?

  • Enhancing Forgejo Integration: Implementing methods to allow the service to post comments and add reactions on Forgejo.
  • Implementing Source Fetching: Building the logic to fetch source files from Pull Requests for package builds.
  • Expanding Commands: Adding new commands and tasks to support this workflow.

Stay tuned, more things to share next week 🙂

The post Simplifying Package Submission Progress (8 July – 15 July) – GSoC ’25 appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

Browser wars

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

Browser wars


brown fox on snow field

Photo source: Ray Hennessy (@rayhennessy) | Unsplash


Last week in Rijeka we held Science festival 2015. This is the (hopefully not unlucky) 13th instance of the festival that started in 2003. Popular science events were organized in 18 cities in Croatia.

I was invited to give a popular lecture at the University departments open day, which is a part of the festival. This is the second time in a row that I got invited to give popular lecture at the open day. In 2014 I talked about The Perfect Storm in information technology caused by the fall of economy during 2008-2012 Great Recession and the simultaneous rise of low-cost, high-value open-source solutions. Open source completely changed the landscape of information technology in just a few years.

The follow-up

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

The follow-up


people watching concert

Photo source: Andre Benz (@trapnation) | Unsplash


When Linkin Park released their second album Meteora, they had a quote on their site that went along the lines of

Musicians have their entire lives to come up with a debut album, and only a very short time afterward to release a follow-up.

Open-source magic all around the world

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

Open-source magic all around the world


woman blowing sprinkle in her hand

Photo source: Almos Bechtold (@almosbech) | Unsplash


Last week brought us two interesting events related to open-source movement: 2015 Red Hat Summit (June 23-26, Boston, MA) and Skeptics in the pub (June 26, Rijeka, Croatia).

Joys and pains of interdisciplinary research

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

Joys and pains of interdisciplinary research


white and black coffee maker

Photo source: Trnava University (@trnavskauni) | Unsplash


In 2012 University of Rijeka became NVIDIA GPU Education Center (back then it was called CUDA Teaching Center). For non-techies: NVIDIA is a company producing graphical processors (GPUs), the computer chips that draw 3D graphics in games and the effects in modern movies. In the last couple of years, NVIDIA and other manufacturers allowed the usage of GPUs for general computations, so one can use them to do really fast multiplication of large matrices, finding paths in graphs, and other mathematical operations.

What is the price of open-source fear, uncertainty, and doubt?

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

What is the price of open-source fear, uncertainty, and doubt?


turned on red open LED signage

Photo source: j (@janicetea) | Unsplash


The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (JPCL), published by American Chemical Society, recently put out two Viewpoints discussing open-source software:

  1. Open Source and Open Data Should Be Standard Practices by J. Daniel Gezelter, and
  2. What Is the Price of Open-Source Software? by Anna I. Krylov, John M. Herbert, Filipp Furche, Martin Head-Gordon, Peter J. Knowles, Roland Lindh, Frederick R. Manby, Peter Pulay, Chris-Kriton Skylaris, and Hans-Joachim Werner.

Viewpoints are not detailed reviews of the topic, but instead, present the author's view on the state-of-the-art of a particular field.

The first of two articles stands for open source and open data. The article describes Quantum Chemical Program Exchange (QCPE), which was used in the 1980s and 1990s for the exchange of quantum chemistry codes between researchers and is roughly equivalent to the modern-day GitHub. The second of two articles questions the open-source software development practice, advocating the usage and development of proprietary software. I will dissect and counter some of the key points from the second article below.

On having leverage and using it for pushing open-source software adoption

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

On having leverage and using it for pushing open-source software adoption


Open 24 Hours neon signage

Photo source: Alina Grubnyak (@alinnnaaaa) | Unsplash


Back in late August and early September, I attended 4th CP2K Tutorial organized by CECAM in Zürich. I had the pleasure of meeting Joost VandeVondele's Nanoscale Simulations group at ETHZ and working with them on improving CP2K. It was both fun and productive; we overhauled the wiki homepage and introduced acronyms page, among other things. During a coffee break, there was a discussion on the JPCL viewpoint that speaks against open-source quantum chemistry software, which I countered in the previous blog post.

But there is a story from the workshop which somehow remained untold, and I wanted to tell it at some point. One of the attendants, Valérie Vaissier, told me how she used proprietary quantum chemistry software during her Ph.D.; if I recall correctly, it was Gaussian. Eventually, she decided to learn CP2K and made the switch. She liked CP2K better than the proprietary software package because it is available free of charge, the reported bugs get fixed quicker, and the group of developers behind it is very enthusiastic about their work and open to outsiders who want to join the development.

AMD and the open-source community are writing history

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

AMD and the open-source community are writing history


a close up of a cpu chip on top of a motherboard

Photo source: Andrew Dawes (@andrewdawes) | Unsplash


Over the last few years, AMD has slowly been walking the path towards having fully open source drivers on Linux. AMD did not walk alone, they got help from Red Hat, SUSE, and probably others. Phoronix also mentions PathScale, but I have been told on Freenode channel #radeon this is not the case and found no trace of their involvement.

AMD finally publically unveiled the GPUOpen initiative on the 15th of December 2015. The story was covered on AnandTech, Maximum PC, Ars Technica, Softpedia, and others. For the open-source community that follows the development of Linux graphics and computing stack, this announcement comes as hardly surprising: Alex Deucher and Jammy Zhou presented plans regarding amdgpu on XDC2015 in September 2015. Regardless, public announcement in mainstream media proves that AMD is serious about GPUOpen.

I believe GPUOpen is the best chance we will get in this decade to open up the driver and software stacks in the graphics and computing industry. I will outline the reasons for my optimism below. As for the history behind open-source drivers for ATi/AMD GPUs, I suggest the well-written reminiscence on Phoronix.

I am still not buying the new-open-source-friendly-Microsoft narrative

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

I am still not buying the new-open-source-friendly-Microsoft narrative


black framed window

Photo source: Patrick Bellot (@pbellot) | Unsplash


This week Microsoft released Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) on GitHub, after open sourcing Edge's JavaScript engine last month and a whole bunch of projects before that.

Even though the open sourcing of a bunch of their software is a very nice move from Microsoft, I am still not convinced that they have changed to the core. I am sure there are parts of the company who believe that free and open source is the way to go, but it still looks like a change just on the periphery.

All the projects they have open-sourced so far are not the core of their business. Their latest version of Windows is no more friendly to alternative operating systems than any version of Windows before it, and one could argue it is even less friendly due to more Secure Boot restrictions. Using Office still basically requires you to use Microsoft's formats and, in turn, accept their vendor lock-in.

Put simply, I think all the projects Microsoft has opened up so far are a nice start, but they still have a long way to go to gain respect from the open-source community. What follows are three steps Microsoft could take in that direction.

Free to know: Open access and open source

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

Free to know: Open access and open source


yellow and black come in we're open sign

Photo source: Álvaro Serrano (@alvaroserrano) | Unsplash


!!! info Reposted from Free to Know: Open access & open source, originally posted by STEMI education on Medium.

Q&A with Vedran Miletić

In June 2014, Elon Musk opened up all Tesla patents. In a blog post announcing this, he wrote that patents "serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors." In other words, he joined those who believe that free knowledge is the prerequisite for a great society -- that it is the vibrancy of the educated masses that can make us capable of handling the strange problems our world is made of.

The movements that promote and cultivate this vibrancy are probably most frequently associated with terms "Open access" and "open source". In order to learn more about them, we Q&A-ed Vedran Miletić, the Rocker of Science -- researcher, developer and teacher, currently working in computational chemistry, and a free and open source software contributor and activist. You can read more of his thoughts on free software and related themes on his great blog, Nudged Elastic Band. We hope you will join him, us, and Elon Musk in promoting free knowledge, cooperation and education.

The academic and the free software community ideals

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

The academic and the free software community ideals


book lot on black wooden shelf

Photo source: Giammarco Boscaro (@giamboscaro) | Unsplash


Today I vaguely remembered there was one occasion in 2006 or 2007 when some guy from the academia doing something with Java and Unicode posted on some mailing list related to the free and open-source software about a tool he was developing. What made it interesting was that the tool was open source, and he filed a patent on the algorithm.

Celebrating Graphics and Compute Freedom Day

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

Celebrating Graphics and Compute Freedom Day


stack of white and brown ceramic plates

Photo source: Elena Mozhvilo (@miracleday) | Unsplash


Hobbyists, activists, geeks, designers, engineers, etc have always tinkered with technologies for their purposes (in early personal computing, for example). And social activists have long advocated the power of giving tools to people. An open hardware movement driven by these restless innovators is creating ingenious versions of all sorts of technologies, and freely sharing the know-how through the Internet and more recently through social media. Open-source software and more recently hardware is also encroaching upon centers of manufacturing and can empower serious business opportunities and projects.

The free software movement is cited as both an inspiration and a model for open hardware. Free software practices have transformed our culture by making it easier for people to become involved in producing things from magazines to music, movies to games, communities to services. With advances in digital fabrication making it easier to manipulate materials, some now anticipate an analogous opening up of manufacturing to mass participation.

Enabling HTTP/2, HTTPS, and going HTTPS-only on inf2

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

Enabling HTTP/2, HTTPS, and going HTTPS-only on inf2


an old padlock on a wooden door

Photo source: Arkadiusz Gąsiorowski (@ambuscade) | Unsplash


Inf2 is a web server at University of Rijeka Department of Informatics, hosting Sphinx-produced static HTML course materials (mirrored elsewhere), some big files, a WordPress instance (archived elsewhere), and an internal instance of Moodle.

HTTPS was enabled on inf2 for a long time, albeit using a self-signed certificate. However, with Let's Encrpyt coming into public beta, we decided to join the movement to HTTPS.

Why we use reStructuredText and Sphinx static site generator for maintaining teaching materials

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

Why we use reStructuredText and Sphinx static site generator for maintaining teaching materials


open book lot

Photo source: Patrick Tomasso (@impatrickt) | Unsplash


Yesterday I was asked by Edvin Močibob, a friend and a former student teaching assistant of mine, the following question:

You seem to be using Sphinx for your teaching materials, right? As far as I can see, it doesn't have an online WYSIWYG editor. I would be interested in comparison of your solution with e.g. MediaWiki.

While the advantages and the disadvantages of static site generators, when compared to content management systems, have been written about and discussed already, I will outline our reasons for the choice of Sphinx below. Many of the points have probably already been presented elsewhere.

Fly away, little bird

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

Fly away, little bird


macro-photography blue, brown, and white sparrow on branch

Photo source: Vincent van Zalinge (@vincentvanzalinge) | Unsplash


The last day of July happened to be the day that Domagoj Margan, a former student teaching assistant and a great friend of mine, set up his own DigitalOcean droplet running a web server and serving his professional website on his own domain domargan.net. For a few years, I was helping him by providing space on the server I owned and maintained, and I was always glad to do so. Let me explain why.

Mirroring free and open-source software matters

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

Mirroring free and open-source software matters


gold and silver steel wall decor

Photo source: Tuva Mathilde Løland (@tuvaloland) | Unsplash


Post theme song: Mirror mirror by Blind Guardian

A mirror is a local copy of a website that's used to speed up access for the users residing in the area geographically close to it and reduce the load on the original website. Content distribution networks (CDNs), which are a newer concept and perhaps more familiar to younger readers, serve the same purpose, but do it in a way that's transparent to the user; when using a mirror, the user will see explicitly which mirror is being used because the domain will be different from the original website, while, in case of CDNs, the domain will remain the same, and the DNS resolution (which is invisible to the user) will select a different server.

Free and open-source software was distributed via (FTP) mirrors, usually residing in the universities, basically since its inception. The story of Linux mentions a directory on ftp.funet.fi (FUNET is the Finnish University and Research Network) where Linus Torvalds uploaded the sources, which was soon after mirrored by Ted Ts'o on MIT's FTP server. The GNU Project's history contains an analogous process of making local copies of the software for faster downloading, which was especially important in the times of pre-broadband Internet, and it continues today.

Markdown vs reStructuredText for teaching materials

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

Markdown vs reStructuredText for teaching materials


blue wooden door surrounded by book covered wall

Photo source: Eugenio Mazzone (@eugi1492) | Unsplash


Back in summer 2017. I wrote an article explaining why we used Sphinx and reStructuredText to produce teaching materials and not a wiki. In addition to recommending Sphinx as the solution to use, it was general praise for generating static HTML files from Markdown or reStructuredText.

This summer I made the conversion of teaching materials from reStructuredText to Markdown. Unfortunately, the automated conversion using Pandoc didn't quite produce the result I wanted so I ended up cooking my own Python script that converted the specific dialect of reStructuredText that was used for writing the contents of the group website and fixing a myriad of inconsistencies in the writing style that accumulated over the years.

Don't use RAR

Posted by Vedran Miletić on 2025-07-16 07:18:26 UTC

Don't use RAR


a large white tank

Photo source: Tim Mossholder (@ctimmossholder) | Unsplash


I sometimes joke with my TA Milan Petrović that his usage of RAR does not imply that he will be driving a rari. After all, he is not Devito rapping^Wsinging Uh 😤. Jokes aside, if you search for "should I use RAR" or a similar phrase on your favorite search engine, you'll see articles like 2007 Don't Use ZIP, Use RAR and 2011 Why RAR Is Better Than ZIP & The Best RAR Software Available.