GNU Planet!

A lot has changed since the two last news from the GNU Boot project.

People involved in the GNU Boot project will be organizing a 100% free
software install party within a bigger event that also has a regular
install party. There will also be a presentation about 100% free
software in there. The event will be mainly in French.

More details are available in French and in English in the following
link:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2024-11/msg00112.html

Many changes were made since the RC3 and since then we fixed an
important bug that prevented Trisquel from booting (If during the
Trisquel installation you chose "LVM2" and didn't encrypt the
storage, GNU Boot images with GRUB would not find the Trisquel
installation).

Because of that we decided to do a new RC4 (release candidate 4)
and to publish new GNU Boot images.

There are still some work needed before doing a 0.1 release as we want
to make it easier for less technical users to install and use GNU
Boot, but more and more of the project structure are getting in place
(website, manual, automatic tests, guix, good development procedures,
enabling build on all distributions, etc) which then makes it easier
to contribute.

We also decided to use Guix for more of the software components
we build, and since this is a big change, we will need people to
help more with testing.

The last announcement we made was "Nonfree software found in GNU Boot
releases again, many distros affected"[1].

Some people misunderstood it (maybe we could have been more clear):
the nonfree software that we found was code that GNU Boot didn't use,
so it was easy to remove and it didn't affect the supported devices in
any way.

Finding nonfree software in 100% free distribution is also common:
this is part of the work to ensure these distribution remains 100%
free.

The first time it happened in GNU Boot we publicized it to explain why
we were re-releasing some of the GNU Boot files as it could be very
scary if this happens without any public communication.

The second time we published a news about it mainly to help propagate
the information to the affected distributions and this is probably why
it was misunderstood: it was mainly targeted at GNU Boot users and
maintainers of the affected packages. We also contacted upstream and
some affected distributions directly as well but contacting everybody
takes a lot of time so having a news about it helps. At least Debian
and Trisquel fixed the issue but we still need to contact some
distributions.

After that, and probably thanks to the previous news, Leah Rowe
contacted us on one of the GNU Boot mailing lists[2] to notify us that
she also found additional similar nonfree software in GNU Boot.

So we confirmed that and promptly removed them and re-made again the
source release. And here again even if the work was delayed a bit,
this was fast to do and it doesn't affect the supported devices in any
way.

But we also need help contacting distributions again because one of
the issue she found is very serious because it affects many
distributions and also important devices that GNU Boot doesn't
support.

The ARM trusted firmware ships a nonfree hdcp.bin binary in its source
code. ARM trusted firmware is a dependency of u-boot that is used to
support many ARM computers in other distributions (like Guix, Debian,
etc).

As contacting affected distributions is a tedious task, we also need
help to propagate the information and contact them especially because
we don't know if Leah intend or not to do that work (so far she didn't
reply when asked twice about it), so it's probably up to the GNU Boot
community as a whole (which also includes its maintainers and readers
of this news) to help here.

The details are in the commit 343515aee7ef34695ac45830fad419d9562f9c15
("coreboot: blobs.list: arm-trusted-firmware: Remove RK3399 hdcp.bin
firmware.") in the GNU Boot source code[3].

[1]https://savannah.gnu.org/news/?id=10684
[2]https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnuboot-patches/2024-10/msg00028.html
[3]https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuboot.git/commit/?id=343515aee7ef34695ac45830fad419d9562f9c15

Jordán (isf) has been contributing some Spanish translations of the
most important website pages (the landing, status and how to
contribute pages). This is important as it could help get more
contributors. These contributions also helped us improve the process
for accepting pseudonymous contributions and enabled us to fix issues.

The work on improving the website in general also continued. Many of
the website pages were reviewed and improved (there is a lot of work
there and mentioning it all would make the news way too long).

The website also now shows the git revision from which it is build and
we also helped the FSF fix some server configuration that created
issue with the deployment of the GNU Boot website (more details are in
the commit message[1]) by reporting the issue to them and testing the
fix.

Patches for making a manual are also being reviewed. While there isn't
much in the manual yet, it also enables to better organize the
documentation and it has the potential to make GNU Boot more
accessible to less technical people.

The next goals is to look how to merge part of the website inside the
manual and continue improving both the website and the manual.

[1]https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuboot.git/commit/?id=d1df672383f6eb8d4218fdef7fbe9ec5e41803e4

We now have the ability to verify the source code when downloading it
from git. This is important to avoid certain type of attacks and it
also enables to write code to automatically download, verify and build
the GNU Boot source code.

The source can be verified with the following command (it requires to
have Guix installed):
 $ guix git authenticate $(git rev-parse HEAD) \
  "E23C 26A5 DEEE C5FA 9CDD  D57A 57BC 26A3 6871 16F6" \
  -k origin/keyring

If the authentication works it will print a message like that:

    guix git: successfully
    authenticated commit 05c09293d9660ea1f26b5b705a089b466a0aa718

The 05c09293d9660ea1f26b5b705a089b466a0aa718 might be different in
your case.

The "E23C 26A5 DEEE C5FA 9CDD D57A 57BC 26A3 6871 16F6" part in the
command above is Adrien Bourmault (neox)'s GPG key.

How to use that will be documented more in depth in the upcoming GNU
Boot manual that is currently being reviewed. Its importance will also
be explained in more details for people not familiar with the security
issues it's meant to solve. Also note that we also welcome help for
reviewing patches.

The GNU Boot source code has a complex history. It is based on the
last fully free software releases of Libreboot. And the Libreboot
source code history is very complex.

We found some missing authorship information in some of the files that
come from Libreboot and so we started such information from the
various git repositories that were used at some point by Libreboot or
some of the projects it was based on.

To help with this task we also added a page on the GNU Boot website
(https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuboot/web/docs/history/) to track the
status of the reconstruction of the missing authorship and to document
the GNU Boot source code history.

GNU Boot is just a distribution and like most distributions, it tries
to collaborate with various upstream projects whenever possible.

Since GNU Boot relies on Guix, we improved the Guix documentation
directly to help people install Guix on Trisquel and Parabola. We also
helped Trisquel fix security issues in the Guix package by bug
reporting and testing fixes (some bugs still need to be fixed in
Parabola and Debian, and reporting issues upstream takes time).

Since we also advise to use PureOS or Trisquel to build GNU Boot we
also enabled people with Guix to produce PureOS or Trisquel chroots
with Debootstrap. This was done through contributions to Debootstrap,
and to the Guix Debootstrap package. We could then mention that in the
GNU Boot build documentation
(https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuboot/web/docs/build/) and added a
script (in contrib/start-guix-daemon.py) to support building GNU Boot
in chroots. However there are still issue with the build in chroots
that need to be fixed to producing all released files. Instructions on
how to do build in chroots is also lacking.

In addition we also added the ability to build GNU Boot with Trisquel
11 (aramo).

An apt-cacher-ng package was also contributed in Guix upstream as it
can then be used to speed-up one of the automatic tests used in GNU
Boot but the support for apt-cacher-ng was not integrated yet in GNU
Boot. Last year we also contributed a GRUB package in Guix but we
didn't have the occasion to use it yet. It will probably happen soon
though.

How to build GNU Boot has changed a lot since GNU Boot 0.1 RC3.

Before Guix could only be optionally used to build the website.

In addition to that, Guix is now integrated in the build system so we
can now rely on Guix packages to build GNU Boot images. This also
means that you need to install Guix to build GNU Boot images.

We currently use Guix packages to build some tests. We also build some
installation utilities for the I945 ThinkPads (ThinkPad X60, X60s,
X60T and T60) but we don't have documentation for less technical
people yet on how to use them. We also would need help for testing
these computers as we have no idea if they still work fine or which
fully free distributions still work on them in practice.

We now also support the './configure' and 'make' commands to build GNU
Boot but not yet the 'make install' command as to work we would need
to adapt many of the scripts that are used during the build to be
compatible with that.

There is also less visible work that was done, like cleaning up a lot
of code, adding tests for code quality, documenting a bit the GNU Boot
source code structure, and so on.

Work on making GNU Boot reproducible also started. See
https://reproducible-builds.org/ or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds for more detail on
the issue.

We took an extremely strict approach and put the checksum of some of
the things we build directly into GNU Boot and verify it the checksum
during the compilation. This enables us to automatically detect
issues without having to do anything.

We started to enable that for easy things, and we also added the
infrastructure to also use that in Guix packages as well by validating
one of the packages we use during automatic testing.

However at one point this guix package stopped being
reproducible. Since we wanted to keep that code (especially as it was
showing a good example of how to do it), we fixed the bug instead of
removing the test.

This then helped us detect a very subtle and interesting bug in one of
the components we use for automatic tests.

The bug could not be caught during testing because some time
information stored inside the FAT32 file system has a granularity of a
day, and since all the testing happened the same day, it was caught
only later on.

This bug was then fixed and the details are in the fix[1]. A bug
report was also opened upstream because bugs were found in diffoscope
along the way[2]. We still need to do some testing though to
understand if the bug is in diffoscope or one of the underlying
libraries (libguestfs) and then to report the remaining bugs to the
distributions we used during this work.

We also made it easier to update the checksum in the Guix package. If
you package software with Guix, this change is also a good example of
how not to break the '--without-tests' option when you override the
tests in the package you contribute. The commit message[3] and the
change have more details and references on all that.

[1]https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuboot.git/commit/?id=4c3de49fbb3b43940b43f8fdccc8e51ee7df8f46
[2]https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/diffoscope/-/issues/390
[3]https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuboot.git/commit/?id=40fcb94e2f7ab1df8d320f78311e623f801d8602

WodeShengli reported a very important bug[1]: GNU Boot images with
GRUB can't find LVM2 partitions if the partition itself is not
encrypted. For instance if you have LVM2 and no encryption at all or
if the disk is encrypted and that on top you have LVM2, GNU Boot will
not find the partition.

Since this is an extremely serious usability issue (because images
with GRUB are supposed to work out of the box) we spent time to fix
it.

The issue was that the GRUB configuration we ship hardcoded the name
of the LVM volumes to try to boot from. Fixing it required to be able
loop over all the partitions being found, but we found no command to
do that in GRUB (which is probably why the LVM partition names were
hardcoded in the first place).

So we started adding GRUB command options to do that but while the
code worked fine, it didn't integrate in GRUB well. So we contacted
GRUB looking for help as we would have needed to upstream our command
option in GRUB anyway.

And we were told that GRUB already had a way to do what we were
looking for so we used that to fix the issue.

We also added tests that automatically download the Trisquel installer
and installs Trisquel with LVM2 and test if GNU Boot can boot the new
Trisquel installation[2].

While this test is skipped for 32bit computers, it is still good to
have as some people will run it. The test also paves the way to add
more tests that would enable us to improve further the GRUB
configuration without breaking the boot.

[1]https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?65663
[2]https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuboot.git/commit/?id=860b00bf1e798d86c8bb2a70d77633599dfa1da2
[3]https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuboot.git/commit/?id=9cc02ddde1e164fabfbddc8bbd3832ef9468d92d

GNU Parallel 20241122 ('Ahoo Daryaei') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

Quote of the month:

  GNU parallel is so satisfying
    -- James Coman @jcoman.bsky.social

New in this release:

• --pipe --block works similar to --pipepart --block if --block size is negative.
• DBURLs can be written with / instead of %2F for sqlite and CSV.
• Bug fixes and man page updates.

News about GNU Parallel:

• Embarrassingly GNU parallel https://dengin.xyz/blog/2024/10/24/embarrassingly-gnu-parallel/
• GNU Parallel for Your Terminal Tasks https://erolrecep.github.io/posts/gnuparallel_for_your_terminal_tasks/
• How to leverage GNU parallel to utilize multiple cores while running AUGUSTUS https://lifescienceshub.wixsite.com/lifesciencehub/post/how-to-leverage-gnu-parallel-to-utilize-multiple-cores-while-running-augustus
• GNU Parallel: The Good Parts https://diekmeier.de/posts/2024-11-17-gnu-parallel/
• Put your CPU to work with GNU Parallel https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/gnu-parallel

GNU Parallel - For people who live life in the parallel lane.

If you like GNU Parallel record a video testimonial: Say who you are, what you use GNU Parallel for, how it helps you, and what you like most about it. Include a command that uses GNU Parallel if you feel like it.

GNU Parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. A job can also be a command that reads from a pipe. GNU Parallel can then split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel.

If you use xargs and tee today you will find GNU Parallel very easy to use as GNU Parallel is written to have the same options as xargs. If you write loops in shell, you will find GNU Parallel may be able to replace most of the loops and make them run faster by running several jobs in parallel. GNU Parallel can even replace nested loops.

GNU Parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it possible to use output from GNU Parallel as input for other programs.

For example you can run this to convert all jpeg files into png and gif files and have a progress bar:

  parallel --bar convert {1} {1.}.{2} ::: *.jpg ::: png gif

Or you can generate big, medium, and small thumbnails of all jpeg files in sub dirs:

  find . -name '*.jpg' |
    parallel convert -geometry {2} {1} {1//}/thumb{2}_{1/} :::: - ::: 50 100 200

You can find more about GNU Parallel at: http://www.gnu.org/s/parallel/

You can install GNU Parallel in just 10 seconds with:

    $ (wget -O - pi.dk/3 || lynx -source pi.dk/3 || curl pi.dk/3/ || \
       fetch -o - http://pi.dk/3 ) > install.sh
    $ sha1sum install.sh | grep 883c667e01eed62f975ad28b6d50e22a
    12345678 883c667e 01eed62f 975ad28b 6d50e22a
    $ md5sum install.sh | grep cc21b4c943fd03e93ae1ae49e28573c0
    cc21b4c9 43fd03e9 3ae1ae49 e28573c0
    $ sha512sum install.sh | grep ec113b49a54e705f86d51e784ebced224fdff3f52
    79945d9d 250b42a4 2067bb00 99da012e c113b49a 54e705f8 6d51e784 ebced224
    fdff3f52 ca588d64 e75f6033 61bd543f d631f592 2f87ceb2 ab034149 6df84a35
    $ bash install.sh

Watch the intro video on http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1

Walk through the tutorial (man parallel_tutorial). Your command line will love you for it.

When using programs that use GNU Parallel to process data for publication please cite:

O. Tange (2018): GNU Parallel 2018, March 2018, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1146014.

If you like GNU Parallel:

• Give a demo at your local user group/team/colleagues
• Post the intro videos on Reddit/Diaspora*/forums/blogs/ Identi.ca/Google+/Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin/mailing lists
• Get the merchandise https://gnuparallel.threadless.com/designs/gnu-parallel
• Request or write a review for your favourite blog or magazine
• Request or build a package for your favourite distribution (if it is not already there)
• Invite me for your next conference

If you use programs that use GNU Parallel for research:

• Please cite GNU Parallel in you publications (use --citation)

If GNU Parallel saves you money:

• (Have your company) donate to FSF https://my.fsf.org/donate/

GNU sql aims to give a simple, unified interface for accessing databases through all the different databases' command line clients. So far the focus has been on giving a common way to specify login information (protocol, username, password, hostname, and port number), size (database and table size), and running queries.

The database is addressed using a DBURL. If commands are left out you will get that database's interactive shell.

When using GNU SQL for a publication please cite:

O. Tange (2011): GNU SQL - A Command Line Tool for Accessing Different Databases Using DBURLs, ;login: The USENIX Magazine, April 2011:29-32.

GNU niceload slows down a program when the computer load average (or other system activity) is above a certain limit. When the limit is reached the program will be suspended for some time. If the limit is a soft limit the program will be allowed to run for short amounts of time before being suspended again. If the limit is a hard limit the program will only be allowed to run when the system is below the limit.

Hi, All:

Please join me in welcoming our new member:

User Details:
-------------
Name:    Haoran Du
Login:   bingchuanjuzi
Email:   dududu233@outlook.com

I wish bingchuanjuzi a wonderful journey in GNU CTT.

Happy Hacking
wxie

Libtoolers!

The Libtool Team is pleased to announce the release of libtool 2.5.4.

GNU Libtool hides the complexity of using shared libraries behind a
consistent, portable interface. GNU Libtool ships with GNU libltdl, which
hides the complexity of loading dynamic runtime libraries (modules)
behind a consistent, portable interface.

There have been 49 commits by 16 people in the 8 weeks since 2.5.3.

See the NEWS below for a brief summary.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:

  Adrien Destugues (1)
  Alastair McKinstry (6)
  Bruno Haible (1)
  Ileana Dumitrescu (27)
  Jerome Duval (1)
  Jonathan Nieder (2)
  Joshua Root (1)
  Khalid Masum (1)
  Markus Mützel (1)
  Martin Storsjö (1)
  Richard Purdie (1)
  Sergey Poznyakoff (1)
  Tim Schumacher (1)
  Vincent Lefevre (2)
  mintsuki (1)
  streaksu (1)

Ileana
 [on behalf of the libtool maintainers]
==================================================================

Here is the GNU libtool home page:
    https://gnu.org/s/libtool/

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  https://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=libtool.git;a=shortlog;h=v2.5.4
or run this command from a git-cloned libtool directory:
  git shortlog v2.5.3..v2.5.4

Here are the compressed sources:
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/libtool/libtool-2.5.4.tar.gz   (2.0MB)
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/libtool/libtool-2.5.4.tar.xz   (1.1MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures:
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/libtool/libtool-2.5.4.tar.gz.sig
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/libtool/libtool-2.5.4.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

  77227188ead223ed8ba447301eda3761cb68ef57  libtool-2.5.4.tar.gz
  2o67LOTc9GuQCY2vliz/po9LT2LqYPeY0O8Skp7eat8=  libtool-2.5.4.tar.gz
  9781a113fe6af1b150571410b29d3eee2e792516  libtool-2.5.4.tar.xz
  +B9YYGZrC8fYS63e+mDRy5+m/OsjmMw7rKavqmAmZnU=  libtool-2.5.4.tar.xz

Verify the base64 SHA256 checksum with cksum -a sha256 --check
from coreutils-9.2 or OpenBSD's cksum since 2007.

Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify libtool-2.5.4.tar.gz.sig

The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:

  pub   rsa4096 2021-09-23 [SC]
        FA26 CA78 4BE1 8892 7F22  B99F 6570 EA01 146F 7354
  uid   Ileana Dumitrescu <ileanadumi95@protonmail.com>
  uid   Ileana Dumitrescu <ileanadumitrescu95@gmail.com>

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

  gpg --locate-external-key ileanadumi95@protonmail.com

  gpg --recv-keys 6570EA01146F7354

  wget -q -O- 'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=libtool&download=1' | gpg --import -

As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:

  wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
  gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify libtool-2.5.4.tar.gz.sig

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.72e
  Automake 1.17
  Gnulib v1.0-1108-gea58a72d4d

NEWS

• Noteworthy changes in release 2.5.4 (2024-11-20) [stable]

** New features:

  - New libtool command line flag, --no-finish, to skip executing
    finish_cmds that would alter the shared library cache during testing.

  - New libtool command line flag, --reorder-cache=DIRS, to reorder the
    shared library cache, only on OpenBSD.

** Bug fixes:

  - Fix incorrect use of workarounds designed for Darwin versions that
    don't have -single_module support.

  - Fix errors when executing 'make distclean' and 'make maintainer-clean'.

  - Fix bug where the constructed rpath omit directories, instead of
    appending them to the end.

  - Fix configure error for when variable 'multlib' is unset.

  - Fix searching for -L in link paths being over-greedy and incorrectly
    handling paths with -L in them.

  - Avoid using AC_TRY_EVAL macro, "dangerous and undocumented".

  - Fix linking libraries at runtime with tcc by adding run path.

  - Fix path comparison by removing trailing slashes on install commands.

  - Fix linking for mingw with lld by prefering response files over the
    linker script.

  - Fix '-Fe' usage with linking in MSVC.

  - Fix '--no-warnings' flag.

  - Fix handling xlc(1)-specific options.

  - Fix Haiku support.

** Changes in supported systems or compilers:

  - Support additional flang-based compilers, 'f18' and 'f95'.

  - Support for 'netbsdelf*-gnu'.

  - Support for '*-mlibc', and subsequently Ironclad and Managarm.

  - Support for SerenityOS.

  - Support for wasm32-emscripten.

Enjoy!

To understand the views of the Guix community we're running a survey that we'd love you to take part in! The Guix User and Contributor Survey is live now, and should take about 10 minutes to fill out. Perfect for doing with a cup of tea and a biscuit!

The Guix project continues to grow and change, with new contributors and users joining our community. We decided to run this survey as it's the best way to gather good quality feedback across the widest cross-section of the community. Of course, there's lots of interesting topics a survey could ask about! We decided to focus on how Guix is used, and how contributors take part in the project.

The survey is being run on LimeSurvey which is a Free Software project and has been used by many other projects for similar surveys. The survey's hosted on the LimeSurvey SaaS so that we don't have the additional task of operating the software. No personal data is asked for (e.g. email addresses), no tracking data is being collected (e.g. IP addresses) and the entries are anonymised.

We'll be making the results and the anonymised data available under the Creative Commons CCO: that way anyone can analyse the data for further insights.

We hope the results of the survey will be used to understand both the Guix project's strengths and areas we can improve. Which is why your input is so important. If you can, please take the survey!

Take the survey now!