Petter Reinholdtsen

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 and sponsoring from the initial start in 2023 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. I am very grateful for their contributions over the years, both with freeing up time for me and supporting several events and projects where I have been involved or taken the initiative on. Now they are reorganizing with more focus on paperwork and applications.

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

It is a while since I posted a summary of the free software and open culture activities and projects I have worked on. Here is a quick summary of the major ones from last year.

I guess the biggest project of the year has been migrating orphaned packages in Debian without a version control system to have a git repository on salsa.debian.org. When I started in April around 450 the orphaned packages needed git. I've since migrated around 250 of the packages to a salsa git repository, and around 40 packages were left when I took a break. Not sure who did the around 160 conversions I was not involved in, but I am very glad I got some help on the project. I stopped partly because some of the remaining packages needed more disk space to build than I have available on my development machine, and partly because some had a strange build setup I could not figure out. I had a time budget of 20 minutes per package, if the package proved problematic and likely to take longer, I moved to another package. Might continue later, if I manage to free up some disk space.

Another rather big project was the translation to Norwegian Bokmål and publishing of the first book ever published by a Sámi woman, the «Møter vi liv eller død?» book by Elsa Laula, with a PD0 and CC-BY license. I released it during the summer, and to my surprise it has already sold several copies. As I suck at marketing, I did not expect to sell any.

A smaller, but more long term project (for more than 10 years now), and related to orphaned packages in Debian, is my project to ensure a simple way to install hardware related packages in Debian when the relevant hardware is present in a machine. It made a fairly big advance forward last year, partly because I have been poking and begging package maintainers and upstream developers to include AppStream metadata XML in their packages. I've also released a few new versions of the isenkram system with some robustness improvements. Today 127 packages in Debian provide such information, allowing isenkram-lookup to propose them. Will keep pushing until the around 35 package names currently hard coded in the isenkram package are down to zero, so only information provided by individual packages are used for this feature.

As part of the work on AppStream, I have sponsored several packages into Debian where the maintainer wanted to fix the issue but lacked direct upload rights. I've also sponsored a few other packages, when approached by the maintainer.

I would also like to mention two hardware related packages in particular where I have been involved, the megactl and mfi-util packages. Both work with the hardware RAID systems in several Dell PowerEdge servers, and the first one is already available in Debian (and of course, proposed by isenkram when used on the appropriate Dell server), the other is waiting for NEW processing since this autumn. I manage several such Dell servers and would like the tools needed to monitor and configure these RAID controllers to be available from within Debian out of the box.

Vaguely related to hardware support in Debian, I have also been trying to find ways to help out the Debian ROCm team, to improve the support in Debian for my artificial idiocy (AI) compute node. So far only uploaded one package, helped test the initial packaging of llama.cpp and tried to figure out how to get good speech recognition like Whisper into Debian.

I am still involved in the LinuxCNC project, and organised a developer gathering in Norway last summer. A new one is planned the summer of 2025. I've also helped evaluate patches and uploaded new versions of LinuxCNC into Debian.

After a 10 years long break, we managed to get a new and improved upstream version of lsdvd released just before Christmas. As I use it regularly to maintain my DVD archive, I was very happy to finally get out a version supporting DVDDiscID useful for uniquely identifying DVDs. I am dreaming of a Internet service mapping DVD IDs to IMDB movie IDs, to make life as a DVD collector easier.

My involvement in Norwegian archive standardisation and the free software implementation of the vendor neutral Noark 5 API continued for the entire year. I've been pushing patches into both the API and the test code for the API, participated in several editorial meetings regarding the Noark 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt specification, submitted several proposals for improvements for the same. We also organised a small seminar for Noark 5 interested people, and is organising a new seminar in a month.

Part of the year was spent working on and coordinating a Norwegian Bokmål translation of the marvellous children's book «Ada and Zangemann», which focus on the right to repair and control your own property, and the value of controlling the software on the devices you own. The translation is mostly complete, and is now waiting for a transformation of the project and manuscript to use Docbook XML instead of a home made semi-text based format. Great progress is being made and the new book build process is almost complete.

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

The lsdvd project got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood. This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve Dibb.

I just wrapped up a new lsdvd release, available in git or from the download page. This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version 0.17.

• Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks
• Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is non-existant, to work around additional copy protection
• Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles
• Fix pallete display of first entry
• Fix include orders
• Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway
• Fix the chapter count
• Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising the palette size is the same.
• Fix array printing.
• Correct subsecond calculations.
• Add sector information to the output format.
• Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings with more GCC compiler warnings.

This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the project the last nine years. Please check it out. :)

I use the lsdvd tool to handle my fairly large DVD collection. It is a nice command line tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length, etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format. But lsdvd have not seen any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting its use with some DVDs. Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the project, without any reply. But I use it regularly and would like to get an updated version into Debian. So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take over. And yesterday, I became project admin.

I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly, collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place. I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too. If you got a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out the git source and join the project mailing list. :)