GNU Planet!

It’s no news. They’re stealing the Internet from us and we must do something about it. What it used to be a fun, collaborative hacking space is now ruled by corporations and narcissistic billionaires. Proprietary centralized social networks have become a space for hate, discrimination and propaganda. The messages that you see are those that they want you to see. Your data is no longer yours. They have become a massive thought control machine. You read what they want you to read and, in the end, you will end up writing and doing what they want you to write and to do. It’s a matter of time and money, and they have both.

These corporate-driven social networks are deceiving. They make us fall into false assumptions in a distorted reality. This delusion hits both individuals and organizations. For instance, in GNU Solidario and GNU Health, we fight for Social Medicine and for the rights of human and non-human animals. When we want to share an event, to make a fundraising campaign or to denounce human or animal rights violations we want the message to reach out as many people as possible. We could think, why not share it with our followers on Twitter / X? Experience has it, corporate social networks have not really made a difference in the outcomes. They will promote or “shadow ban” the message depending on who wrote it. You can guess the results for those who fight against neoliberal capitalism.

“The many branches of the Fediverse” (credits: Axbom)

Social pressure exists, and is not trivial to overcome. Many fear that leaving proprietary centralized social networks that have been using for years will result in losing the status and contacts they’ve built throughout the years. Again, it’s not really a big deal. And we have great news, there are decentralized, community-driven alternatives! Some of those alternatives are Mastodon, Friendica or Diaspora. Not only social networks, today there is an free software alternative to pretty much any proprietary solution (search engines, scientific programs, multimedia, office suites, databases, games…)

The GNU head, symbol of the GNU project

There is a correlation between Free Software, freedom and privacy. The more Free Software, the more freedom and privacy you enjoy. The contrary also applies: Proprietary software is inversely proportional to our freedom, both at individual and collective level. There is no transparency, no privacy, no control, no rights in proprietary applications, networks or clouds.

In the last decades, the tech giants have been busy in a campaign to dismantle the Free Software philosophy and community. The “open source” euphemism is one of them. Richard Stallman (creator of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation) has been warning us about the dangers of “Open Source”. Free societies are built with free software, not with open source. I know some members in the free software community use both terms interchangeably, but I am convinced using the “Free Software” terms not only delivers software, but also freedom to our society.

Internet is no longer fun or empathetic. It has become a hostile and toxic environment, the medium for corporations and elites that increase concentration of power, social gradient and create very unjust societies. They use our data to control individuals and governments. We certainly don’t want to be part of that.

It is our moral duty to bring back spirit of solidarity that RMS delivered in the late 80’s, and that made possible the GNU movement, the best operating systems, programming languages, web servers and database engines for everyone. The GNU project was the inspiration for projects like GNU Health, helping millions around the globe, delivering freedom and equity in healthcare.

In the end, it is up to us to embrace federated, community driven social networks and free software applications. Millions of individuals, activists, free software projects, NGOs and even the European Union have already joined the Fediverse and Mastodon. It only takes an initial push to break the social pressure to set ourselves and our societies free.

Collage with some members of the GNU Health community around the world

Citing our friends from GNUnet: “You broke the Internet… we’ll build a GNU one”.

Happy hacking!

Follow us in Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@gnuhealth

Libtoolers!

The Libtool Team is pleased to announce the release of libtool 2.5.3.

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 14 commits by 2 people in the 27 days since 2.5.2.

See the NEWS below for a brief summary. An alpha and two beta releases
of GNU Libtool have been released prior to this stable release. Please
view the NEWS entries for those releases for a more complete summary of
the updates between stable releases 2.4.7 and 2.5.3.

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

  Bruno Haible (3)
  Ileana Dumitrescu (11)

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=v2.5.3
or run this command from a git-cloned libtool directory:
  git shortlog v2.5.2..v2.5.3

Here are the compressed sources:
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/libtool/libtool-2.5.3.tar.gz   (2.0MB)
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/libtool/libtool-2.5.3.tar.xz   (1.1MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures:
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/libtool/libtool-2.5.3.tar.gz.sig
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/libtool/libtool-2.5.3.tar.xz.sig

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

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

  f48e2fcdb0b80f97e93366c41fdcd1ea90f2f253  libtool-2.5.3.tar.gz
  kyK9j2vISP2j44WJndGTSVcWllKs73FtGdGdJAU6u5U=  libtool-2.5.3.tar.gz
  f1450b2f652d9acf3b83eee823cad966a149cca4  libtool-2.5.3.tar.xz
  iYARIyzFm2s7u+Mhtgq6nbGsEVeKth7Q3wKZRYFGri4=  libtool-2.5.3.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-2.5.3.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-2.5.3.tar.gz.sig

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.72e
  Automake 1.17
  Gnulib v1.0-803-g30417e7f91

NEWS

• Noteworthy changes in release 2.5.3 (2024-09-25) [stable]

** New features:

  - Add 'aarch64' support to the file magic test, which allows for
    shared libraries to be built with Mingw for aarch64.

** Bug fixes:

  - The configure options --with-pic and --without-pic have been renamed
    to --enable-pic and --disable-pic, respectively.  The old names
    --with-pic and --without-pic are still supported, though, for
    backward compatibility.

  - The configure option --with-aix-soname has been renamed to
    --enable-aix-soname.  The old name --with-aix-soname is still
    supported, though, for backward compatibility.

  - Fix conflicting warnings about AC_PROG_RANLIB.

  - Document situations where -export-symbols does not work.

  - Update FSF office address with URL in each file's license block.

  - Add checks for aclocal in standalone.at and subproject.at test files
    that report failures in Linux From Scratch and Darwin builds.
   

Enjoy!

GNU Parallel 20240922 ('Gold Apollo AR924') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

Quote of the month:

  Recently executed a flawless live data migration of ~2.4pb using GNU parallel for scale and bash scripts.
    -- @mechanicker@twitter Dhruva

New in this release:

• --fast disables a lot of functionality to speed up running jobs.
• Bug fixes and man page updates.

News about GNU Parallel:

• Job requiring GNU Parallel knowledge https://www.capgemini.com/ca-en/jobs/Id6D4pEBZ6aB2WPS2aAJ/systems-engineer/

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.

Do you have too many git branches on the go at once? Here is the command to list them in order of last modification: