lmemsm

I wanted to do something FLOSS related to brighten up people's holidays this year. My initial idea was a countdown to the holidays highlighting different Free, Libre and Open Source software each night. While I may still do that on my Mastodon feed, my initial plans were derailed. I'm in the middle of updating my build scripts and rebuilding some of the FLOSS programs I use from source code with the latest versions of libraries. I thought about sharing build scripts and doing some kind of build from source group meetings but I haven't been able to connect with other source code enthusiasts who enjoy building their software from scratch. I also have not figured out an effective method of sharing build scripts or executables. Feel free to contact me on Mastodon if you have any suggestions related to these ideas: https://fosstodon.org/@lmemsm

One thing I can do for the holiday season is put together a list of astronomy related FLOSS programs. I've built several from source over the years and have particularly been on the lookout for lightweight, low dependency astronomy programs that work well on lower resource and older computers. I'll go through my notes and build scripts and try to post some of them here. I will be adding to this page as I find programs. Also, feel free to contact me and suggest your favorites.

Let's start off with the Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA. You can also find feeds with these pictures on several social media networks and programs that download and display these pictures. NASA's pictures are in the public domain but some of the APOD pictures are from outside contributors and may have be copyrighted.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

Here are some of the more well-known FLOSS astronomy software. Two of the most well known are stellarium and celestia. They run on a wide variety of platforms and I believe there was even an Android port.
Here are links to the Windows portable apps versions. You can find a link to the original web sites from there:
https://portableapps.com/apps/education/celestia_portable
https://portableapps.com/apps/education/stellarium_portable

There are also addons for celestia but the licenses may vary:
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/

Other FLOSS astronomy programs I often see mentioned include:
https://kstars.kde.org/
https://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/start
https://sourceforge.net/projects/openuniverse/
http://www.moshier.net/ssystem.html

Next we have astronomy software for Android. Google's Sky Map program is Open Source. You can find a copy of it and other interesting astronomy programs at F-Droid. There has been a lot of discussion over whether F-Droid will be able to continue its mission with the changes to Google policies for software installation. That's a topic for another post. In the meantime, download these while you can. It wouldn't hurt to have the APKs stored someplace and to look into installing adb (Android Debug Bridge) on your computer for future use just in case.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.google.android.stardroid/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.tengel.planisphere/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/space.celestia.mobilecelestia/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.forrestguice.suntimeswidget/

Finally, here's my favorite category, lightweight cross-platform portable astronomy software. One program I really like is nightsky. It works anywhere the SDL library does. It's been ported to a wide range of platforms including handheld devices. It's lightweight but it's not limited to the command line. It was written for SDL 1.2.x but I do have a patched version that works with SDL 2.x. Haven't had time to look into updating it for the latest version of SDL yet. The lunar calendar program, lcal, is another lightweight option. It is a command line program and generates a postscript lunar phase calendar.
https://nightsky.sourceforge.net/
https://pcal.sourceforge.net/

Command line program and library to show sunrise and sunset.
https://github.com/troglobit/sun

Some lightweight X windows programs with an astronomy theme include:
https://github.com/memarc/sunclock
https://hewgill.com/xearth/original/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/xplanet/

The starplot 0.95.3 program is an older program that requires GTK+ 2 to build.
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/starplot
https://www.freshports.org/astro/starplot/

The gstar program is a GTK 1.2 front end for the starchart programs which is also included. The starchart program is a command line program that creates star charts in postscript format.
https://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/gstar/

The hebcal program is a command line calendar program that also gives the time of sunset:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/hebcal/

The astrolog program is a command line astrology program but the code has some useful astronomy calculations. It used to be freeware but is now available as Free Software.
https://www.astrolog.org/astrolog/astfile.htm

The aa program is an astronomical almanac which calculates orbits of planetary bodies and reduces the coordinates of planets or stars to geocentric and topocentric positions. It was recommended by Neville Jackson on the It's Foss Community Discussion board.
https://github.com/pmontrasio/astronomical-almanac-js/blob/master/aa.c

Some other programs I haven't personally tried but look worth checking into are:
https://github.com/dcf21/star-charter
https://github.com/da-luce/astroterm
https://github.com/XEphem/XEphem
https://github.com/nasa-lambda/skyviewer
https://github.com/astromatic
https://siril.org/
https://github.com/OpenSpace
https://github.com/csete/gpredict
https://sourceforge.net/projects/previsat/
https://github.com/pchev/virtualmoon
https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualplanet/
https://github.com/artyom-beilis/skyhopper
https://github.com/cosmonium/cosmonium
https://github.com/pmontrasio/astronomical-almanac-js
https://sourceforge.net/projects/hnsky/
https://github.com/AndrewBuck/orsa
https://github.com/cosinekitty/astronomy

Let's talk console based software and FOSS operating systems. First, some console based software resources I've liked over the years include:
https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/
https://termux.dev/en/
https://archiveos.org/rogue/
http://inx.maincontent.net/

I have some other resources and console program recommendations in other articles I've written here.

I've seen a lot of FLOSS projects try to convert Windows users to Free Software by sharing GUI based Free operating systems that look a lot like Windows. I really don't know if this is the best strategy to convert people to using something else. Wouldn't it be nice to offer something better and more intuitive rather than just copy what another system can do? I certainly do not think this a good strategy for getting die-hard Windows command line users to switch to FLOSS operating system alternatives. Users that started on DOS and graduated to Windows should be a great market to tap into. Many Unix and Linux systems emphasize console based interactions. However, when Free Software advocates try to reach Windows users and get them to switch, they often end up showing off Windows-like GUIs. They leave out a portion of the market. They leave out the Windows users who don't use Windows because of its GUI design.

What about those of us who still prefer a good old-fashioned command line and want to use console or terminal sessions to get the majority of work done? What kind of conversion path to a Free OS is there for us?

FreeDOS is a wonderful option if you just want DOS. Unfortunately, a lot of current hardware support and drivers are lacking. For years, I've had trouble switching to Linux due to hardware incompatibilities and driver issues. Of all the FOSS operating systems I've tried (BSD, FreeDOS, Minix, etc.), Linux has the best driver support. So, if Linux can't support someone's hardware, it's very likely other options like FreeDOS can't either. FreeDOS does do a very decent job of supporting legacy software and hardware though.

ReactOS is a great path for people who want to use a Free Operating system but want the familiarity of Windows. It runs many Windows programs natively. You can continue to write programs using a Win32 API and have them work on the system. Like FreeDOS, it also doesn't have the drivers and hardware support a commercial system does. Theoretically, when they have something fully compatible with Windows, Windows drivers should just work. It's not at that point of development yet. The biggest drawback I had when trying to use ReactOS was stability. Some Windows programs worked perfectly out-of-the-box. Some crash. I would have liked to get more involved with the project and possibly debug some of my issues. I didn't find it an easy project to join in on if you wanted to help with development.

Using Linux with Wine is another option for people who want to keep using their Windows programs on a Free operating system. I even read about a ReactOS side project where someone used Linux and Wine as a starting point for a ReactOS like system. I love the idea of being able to compile Win32 programs on Linux natively with winelib and have them work on Linux. However, the usual usage is to run Windows programs (closed source) with Wine which emulates a Windows system. They don't even encourage building programs from source with winelib. Personally, I've always found winelib hard to build from source and Wine hard to install on my systems. Some Linux distributions support working with it better than others and some Linux distributions come with Wine already installed.

The X Windows alternative nano-x also offers some Win32 support so you can compile some Windows programs and use them on a system with nano-x libraries. You can build nano-x like an X Windows alternative with client/server support. Projects like NanoLinux and XFDos have created desktop environments using it. You can also build everything into one application (the client and server support) and run applications without a separate nano-x based desktop environment. Most projects have used nano-x to build X11 applications without requiring X11 libraries. However, the potential to port some Win32 applications using the micro-windows part of nano-x is there. Also, nano-x works with a wide variety of operating systems and on a wide variety of hardware.

There are several options for Linux distributions that try to attract Windows users either with Windows look-alike GUIs or with WINE offering the ability to continue to run real Windows programs. However, what is there that's been designed to appeal to those of us who are command line users and want to make a switch? Other than distributions used for restoration or rescue systems like grml and distributions that target minimal systems such as Linux distributions you can run from a floppy or CD, there really aren't many distributions that emphasize a command line interface. There are even less if you're looking for active distributions. Termux is an exception and it targets Android users.

Shells like bash or ash may offer more functionality than batch files, but what competes with Powershell on Linux? At least Mono offers an alternative to .NET. Also, someone who works with a lot of batch files may not find the switch from batch to a shell script all that easy. Backslashes are replaced by forward slashes. Commands like cp and mv are similar to copy and move but don't quite work the same way. Type copy filename in a command line on Windows or DOS and it copies the file to the current directory. Try that in a bash shell with cp and no target file name and you could end up with a mess. Similar syntax that works on Windows may end up corrupting files on Linux/BSD/Unix. If a user isn't already familiar with bash, ash or some of the other shells used on Linux, it's not an easy switch. Just switching between a csh and bash can be a real nuisance to Linux users. Imagine switching from batch to bash.

FreeDOS used to be able to run embedded with Linux systems much the way Windows used to allow users to switch between Windows and DOS. I don't know if that's still an option with Linux distributions and FreeDOS, but DOSBox can make a useful alternative if you want to run Linux and some form of DOS together. Using FreeDOS or DOSBox with Linux allows people to keep working with batch and already created batch scripts. The one drawback with DOSBox is that it doesn't allow for long filenames (beyond the 8.3 convention). There may be some patches to DOSBox that fix this. If so, I would love to find them.

I like the idea of using JavaScript at a command line. It makes an interesting alternative to a shell script. Windows offers this option as part of its wsh system. However, the JavaScript used by Windows is non-standard. It has several extensions not used by other JavaScript implementations such as commands to work with the file system. I looked into projects like TeaJS that work on both Windows and Linux systems as a scripting option. NodeJS seems to have become the de facto standard for command line JavaScript. Plus, it's a cross-platform solution. The main drawback I've heard regarding NodeJS is that the API changes rapidly. So, it's not a very stable system to create command line scripts that you want to be using for years to come.

What are some FOSS operating system options that might appeal to command line users? One could start with a minimal system like Debian netinst or AntiX or TinyCore Linux or possibly some of the musl based distributions. Distributions with large software repositories may have some useful command line applications. Inconsolation showcases many console based apps available from repositories. However, some applications may be dated, not actively supported or have such limited usage that they aren't easily found in a repository. In those cases, it may require building them from source if someone wants to work with them. So, no particular Linux distribution really stands out to me as the best migration path for console users who want to switch to a FOSS system.

For me, the easiest migration path is to have FLOSS programs that work on multiple operating systems. I can use them on a FLOSS operating system, but I can also use them at work where we are required to use closed and proprietary operating systems. If a cross-platform FLOSS program saves data in a particular format, it's likely to use the same format across multiple operating systems. It makes it easier to work with and transfer data. It also helps when the commands you learn, function the same in multiple environments.

Here are some command line tools I use on multiple platforms. I do a lot of my music creation using abc2midi and abcm2ps. I use TiMidity++ in console mode or via command line to convert midi files to wave files. I use diffh and a web browser to view file differences. lxsplit is nice for splitting and joining large files. I use lynx to check if a web page is browser-friendly and accessible. I use a lot of archive tools, communications tools such as curl and putty's plink and psftp, database connection tools, etc. from the command line. There are calendar programs like lcal, dictionary and grammar programs such as sdcv and diction, timer programs and more. There are even programs to draw or edit graphics such as gle, netpbm, imagemagick and graphicsmagick and programs to create DVDs such as dvdauthor.

There is a pattern I've seen with Linux for a long time now. There are great FLOSS program options that appeal to many types of users including those who prefer the command line. With software, having lots of choices can be a positive. However, with operating systems, choice isn't always so positive. There are so many Linux distributions and FOSS operating system options, it's difficult to find one that's user friendly and a good fit. With Windows, there's just one source for it and programs that work on one Windows system work on another Windows system. With Linux, it's not one size fits all. There are so many alternatives and often, none seem to be just right. It's hard to use software from one Linux distribution in another, let alone try to get your Windows executables to run properly. Maybe if more of the Linux community adopted the Linux from Scratch motto of your operating system, your way, it would be easier to switch. However, with lots of Linux operating systems, each with their own niche and their own emphasis on certain features and distinct avoidance of other features, it makes it hard for a user that doesn't fit a specific demographic to use a particular distribution. It's even harder for someone who wants to volunteer efforts to help out a distribution to find the right distribution that would accept the type of help he or she would like to offer.

FOSS is supposed to give users a way to get off the merry-go-round of continually needing to pay to upgrade hardware and software. However, it's not always easy to make that switch. Just offering an operating system that outwardly looks similar to a Windows solution so it will seem familiar isn't always desirable. It can be harder for users when software seems almost alike but certain parts don't work the same way or may potentially have devastating results. The cp command overwriting files that copy wouldn't is a good example. Offering GUI solutions to attract Windows users who primarily use the command line is just not an effective strategy.

What techniques or features would make the switch from another operating system easier for you? If you're like me and prefer working in a console based environment, what would your ideal operating system look like? Have you found a FLOSS distribution or FLOSS tools that fit well for you? Please feel free to share some of your more useful FLOSS finds with me on Mastodon.

I've been interested in web browser development for a while now. Trying to find a lightweight web browser than can be built independently from source and still supports the ability to view the average modern web page is extremely difficult. I feel like the main browser developers now have so much of a monopoly over web development that they managed to become the web standards committee, taking this job away from the W3C which originally maintained web standards. They control what standards become part of the web and even eliminate the need for certain products. Products like Flash and Silverlight became practically obsolete with the advent of HTML 5. While Flash and Silverlight weren't exactly a boon for Free and Open development, the current web standards are so difficult to develop for that independent commercial and Free/Open development alike are both at a loss to keep up.

Some of the browsers I was able to build myself included Netrider, D+ and lynx. Netrider ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/netrider/ ) is based on an older version of webkit. It has a FLTK front end, but was designed to easily allow for other front end development using other GUI libraries. I've used it with SDL and other options. I also ported it to work on Windows so it provided a cross-platform solution. D+ is an older fork of Dillo. Unlike Dillo it works on a variety of operating systems including FreeDOS. Lynx is a text based browser.

There were several text browsers at one point but now development seems to have stopped. Originally one could surf the web using just a text based browser but trying to do so now, is extremely difficult. Many web pages just don't render well in text alone. This is doubly troubling because it's removed the ability for many to use text based browsers and it's made it more difficult for those who are visually impaired to surf the web. I often used text browsers to make sure that the web pages I created rendered well and were easy to navigate. This was one test I used to ensure the pages were user friendly for the visually impaired and the browsers they often use. Some other older text browser projects include links, links2, elinks, w3m. Links was an interesting project as far as text browsers go because it allowed some viewing of graphics using the Linux framebuffer or SDL.

Fifth ( https://github.com/clbr/fifth ) is also an interesting web browser alternative. It's available as a package for TinyCore Linux. Like Netrider, it's based on an older version of webkit and provides an FLTK front end. Unlike Netrider, it's not as portable to other platforms such as Windows.

I looked at netsurf at one point because it's one of the few active independent web browser projects out there. I was unable to build it myself from scratch. It had several libraries, little documentation on building and I had difficulties finding out which version of which library worked with the others. So, I had no luck getting it to build independently as a cohesive project.

Some suckless.org developers solved the issue of getting a modern day web browser to build from source by adopting surf. Surf uses webkit and a GTK GUI front end. The Linux from Scratch project currently includes lynx, links and these browsers in their documentation: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/graphweb.html

There are several interesting independent browser development projects but like surf, they typically use libraries such as webkit or gecko from a larger web development project.

Some independent operating systems are trying to find a way around the browser issue by developing their own. Ladybird from SerenityOS is an example of this: https://ladybird.org/

Some developers are trying to simplify browser development by creating an alternative to the HMTL 5 standard. This is where Gemini comes in. Unfortunately, Google has renamed their AI to Gemini as well which makes it difficult to search for information on the Gemini protocol. One can read more about Geminispace here: https://geminiprotocol.net/ There was an interesting critique of the Gemini protocol from the developer of curl: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/05/28/the-gemini-protocol-seen-by-this-http-client-person/ I'm not sure if any of his issues have been addressed but so far, Gemini hasn't hit the mainstream for replacing the World Wide Web and HTML 5. I have to say, I do like the looks of the Gemini based web sites. However, not all Gemini browsers can render all the sites. The protocol is still evolving and some functionality is experimental. So, it seems to share some similar issues with World Wide Web surfing.

The problem of being able to easily build a web browser from source without requiring a huge number of libraries has been around for a while now. It appears that it will continue to be an issue for independent operating systems and lower resource computers for a long time to come. It would be great to find solutions that would make web browser development less of a monopoly only attempted by major players. I'm surprised groups like the Free Software Foundation don't feel this is an area that should be considered for their High Priority Projects. I guess many believe that as long as there are Free, Libre, Open Source browsers out there that provide source code, it shouldn't matter that it requires a large organization just to build them while building from source is out of reach for the average developer. However, my personal philosophy is that one of the key advantages of Open Source is to be able to build and modify the code for yourself. If I'm unable to do that with a project, it loses a lot of its usefulness for me.

Here's a short but in no way all inclusive list of some web browser projects that avoid using major web libraries such as as webkit and gecko:
https://ladybird.org/index.html
https://www.netsurf-browser.org/
https://github.com/CobaltBSD/neosurf
https://dillo.org/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/
https://github.com/textbrowser/dooble
https://lynx.invisible-island.net/

That's a quick rundown of the state of alternative browser development. If I've missed any other relevant FLOSS browser or Open protocol options, you can reach me on Mastodon and let me know.

Thought it would be fun to consolidate my list of Open Source apps that work via the web. You can use them right in your browser without having to download or install any software.

There are several web/server based FLOSS projects. Plus, it's now easier than ever to convert some popular desktop Open Source projects to the web using techniques such as Web Assembly. I'll add other examples to this list as I find them.

One of the best collections I've found that lists several FLOSS projects designed to work through a browser over the Internet is Libre Projects:
http://libreprojects.net/
It's been around a while, so I don't know how up-to-date the links are but it has some great examples of web based projects that share their source code.

If you're a fan of Audacity, the audio editor, or Tenacity, a great fork of audacity, check out this online fork of the audio editor:
https://wavacity.com/
https://github.com/ahilss/wavacity

Some other projects by the developer of Wavacity:
https://dj.app/
https://life.dj.app/

Here's a video editor:
https://d2jta7o2zej4pf.cloudfront.net/
https://github.com/shamadee/web-dsp

TinyGL has been ported to the web. Click on the graphic examples to see them in action. I personally like the Atlantis example with the whales:
https://github.com/humu2009/tinygl.js

I've a huge fan of the JavaScript aquarium written in under 20 lines of JavaScript. There's also an asteroid game in under 20 lines.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190128002213/http://www.codecouch.com/dansCode/snippets/zoo/index.php
http://www.ozoneasylum.com/24905
https://www.ozoneasylum.com/25666

Here's another interesting online aquarium:
https://lrusso.github.io/Aquarium/Aquarium.htm
https://github.com/lrusso/Aquarium

You can have free web based meetings using Jitsi Meet:
https://meet.jit.si/
https://jitsi.org/downloads/


I've collected the online examples from my educational games list:

2048
https://play2048.co/
https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/2048

Anagramica
http://anagramica.com/
https://github.com/binarymax/anagramica

Everything Attacks
https://github.com/dulsi/everythingattacks
http://identicalsoftware.com/everythingattacks/

Follow Me
https://www.sandeepnambiar.com/follow_me_javascript_simon_clone/
https://github.com/gamedolphin/follow_me_javascript_simon_clone

Hextris
https://hextris.io/

LGames
https://lgames.sourceforge.io/LMastermind/
https://lgames.sourceforge.io/LMemory/
https://lgames.sourceforge.io/

Tuxmath online
https://tuxmath.org/index-en.html?opt_lang=en


More resources:

kribbel@mastodon.social recommended Stendhal. It requires a login, but it's FLOSS and it looks like it could be a lot of fun.
https://stendhalgame.org/index.php?id=content/account/login&url=/account/mycharacters.html

I've been investigating calcurse which is supposed to have support for importing and exporting ical format and exporting pcal format. It sounded like it could integrate well with the other software I use. It has a calendar, information about appointments and a todo list. So, it covers a lot of the functionality I am interested in. I don't find the interface immediately intuitive, but there is documentation. I prefer programs that will work on any operating system I'm using. That means I need Windows support when I'm at work. I could not find any ports of calcurse to a Windows system. The code includes fork and other non-portable functionality which makes porting a nuisance. I did find a DOS version of calcurse. So, I figured if it had been ported to DOS, it could be made to work on Windows. I didn't read the fine print and the DOS port mentions the program hangs on exit and doesn't handle shelling to other applications properly. I went ahead and debugged those issues as best I could. It currently seems to be working on Windows with enough functionality to use it. Haven't figured out how to integrate it with my workflow yet, but it's at least a step toward some progress. I can get it to build with modified code, but I have not put in the work to attempt to automate the building and patching processes. If I'm just going to use it for myself, I may not need to go through that effort. However, if I want to share it and I want to be able to reproduce building on Windows easily, I need to set up my build scripts and create patch files. So, now I'm curious. Is there anyone other than me that would like to have calcurse working on Windows?

There's a lot of potential for Open Hardware/Open Source smartwatches. Smartwatches can be especially useful for monitoring medical information such as heart rate, temperature, blood pressure, oxygen level and sleep. They can be used for fall detection and some automatically call 911 when they detect an issue. They can also be used as emergency alert systems. Commercial options charge recurring fees for medical alert monitoring, fitness tracking or other services that might invade your privacy or have access to your personal data. The Open Source community is always bragging about how Open Source applications can be better than commercial ones because anyone can participate and give feedback or fix issues. Smartwatch manufacturers are just beginning to explore the potential for using a smartwatch to monitor and analyze medical data. There's a lot of room for development and improvement in this area for software that can display medical information in a user friendly way, analyze it and make recommendations based on it.

With all that potential, you'd think there would be more activity in this arena for FLOSS and Open hardware developers. However, when I ask for recommendations for smartwatches, there's relatively little to choose from. Some Open Hardware options just don't include the sensor capabilities to check medical statistics. Without the hardware, it's even harder to develop the software. Some Open Source software projects focus on working with closed, commercial watches and give an Open Source operating system alternative to the vendor's solution. This may help with privacy issues such as who has access to the medical data your watch collects. However, the Open Source alternatives may not be able to take full advantage of the hardware or have full access to all hardware features the way a proprietary solution designed for the device could. To date, I've yet to find an Open smartwatch that is competitive with popular proprietary options. There are some interesting Open smartwatch choices out there, but they're not tailored for medical uses.

Since I haven't been able to find a decent list of medical smartwatch Open Hardware and Libre Software options, I figured I'd put together whatever recommendations I could find in one place. Am hoping the situation will change. If you have other suggestions for potential medical smart devices, please let me know about them.


Open Hardware options

https://watchy.sqfmi.com/
https://open-smartwatch.github.io/
https://www.infinityiot.org/infinity-watch/
https://mutantc.gitlab.io/mutantW_V1.html

Open Software options

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/nodomain.freeyourgadget.gadgetbridge/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.espruino.gadgetbridge.banglejs/
https://asteroidos.org/faq/
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTime
https://github.com/InfiniTimeOrg/InfiniTime

Wanted to write down my notes on signing tools before I ended up losing the information. I was researching what's available in FLOSS signing tools for signing software packages for lightweight Linux distributions. Programs I found that could do that job are listed below.

The one I liked best was usign. The main reason, it's portable and I found it easy to build even on systems that didn't support POSIX. It also doesn't rely on any outside libraries. So, no need to worry about whether you have all the dependencies on your system. Signatures and keys are compatible with OpenBSD's signify utility.
https://github.com/xypron/usign

Most newer signing tools seem to be based on the concepts used by the OpenBSD signing tool, signify. signify uses the ed25519 cryptographic algorithm. It can be used to replace tools like PGP under certain conditions such as for providing some security when working with and installing software packages. There's more information on signify here:
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan-signify.html

A portable version of the BSD signify tool is available:
https://github.com/aperezdc/signify
It requires libbsd to build. There's an older Windows port:
https://github.com/stoeckmann/signify-windows

I wanted something with fewer dependencies and asignify provides that:
https://github.com/vstakhov/asignify
It was inspired by signify. However, it's mainly geared to POSIX compatible systems and requires termios to draw to a terminal screen.

Another option I found that looked promising was minisign:
https://github.com/jedisct1/minisign
https://jedisct1.github.io/minisign/
It requires libsodium and was written by the author of that library.

I also ran across sign:
https://github.com/apankrat/sign
It needs openssl or libressl and was also designed for POSIX systems.

So, of all the options, the only one that had minimal dependencies and no trouble building on operating systems that might not be POSIX compatible was usign.

Since these programs are all mainly using the ed25519 algorithm, it left me wondering if an option might be available that uses libtomcrypt or bearssl since both those dependencies are already on my system. That would cut down on some repeated code. For the present, usign seems sufficient.

I saw some lightweight Linux distributions mention in their documentation that they're using or investigating adding package signing to improve security when working with their systems. I do have my own package manager. At the moment, it mainly uses checksums to check if packages download properly and are what you expect them to be. Not sure how I'd add signed packages to my workflow. My package manager is designed more to work with source code and download the source directly from the web site of a program or library. Sites typically only provide some kind of checksum information such as md5 or sha1 or sha256. If others are using signatures and keys with their workflow when building or sharing packages built from source, I'd be very curious to hear about the processes you're using and how you've integrated it. Please let me know. Since I'm not incorporating signed packages at present, wanted to make sure I summarized the information on FLOSS programs that could handle the signing task in case I might need them in the future.

I've been interested in the BSD versions of diff and patch for a long while now. I often use a version of patch modified from various BSD patch implementations that were based on patch version 2.0.12u8. My variation includes some support for carriage return/line feed differences among systems. I've found it useful when working with patches from Windows or DOS systems that might accidentally introduce carriage return/line feed sequences instead of just line feed which POSIX systems use.

Recently saw an informative page covering some of the history of patch and diff:
https://invisible-island.net/diffstat/
It mentions that the 12u variant of patch contains no copylefted code. It also mentions a version 2.0.12.u9. So, I thought it was interesting that the various BSD versions found on NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD seem to start with version 2.0.12u8 as their basis. I'm very curious as to why they started with u8 instead of u9 but have seen no documentation on it. There doesn't seem to be that many differences between u8 and u9 so they probably didn't use much that was useful. If anyone knows anything further on this or know of some projects that started with the u9 version, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

BSD operating systems such as NetBSD switched from the BSD 4 clause license to the 2 clause. The 2 clause license is compatible with GNU license software while the 4 clause is not. So, it's not surprising that most of the code for BSD diff can be found with a 2 clause license. However, the diffreg.c file still contains the 4 clause license and a 3 clause license. I've searched for alternative versions of diffreg.c with other licenses. There are other versions available such as the diffreg.c that comes with the Plan 9 diff. They use the same algorithm. However, they don't contain some of the updates found in the BSD versions such as support for unified diff.

The BSD version of diff uses the longest common subsequence algorithm which performs in O(n2) at worst case and typically performs as O(nlogn). There is a newer algorithm by Myers that performs in O(nD). It's used by GNU diff. I saw a request a long while ago for someone to update the BSD diff to use the Myers algorithm. I don't think anyone's ever completed the task.

While the BSD version of diff is very usable, it would be nice to have a version of diff without the 4 code clause so that it could possibly be used as library code in conjunction with software that might contain GNU licensed source code. I prefer working with a more lenient license like BSD 2 clause or MIT rather than GNU when possible. So, it would be great to find a version of diff that supported unified diff output and avoided the GNU or BSD 4 clause licenses. I think the main alternative that might offer diff with a more lenient license and unified diff support would be Toybox. The Toybox license is BSD 0. However, Toybox doesn't support as many command line options as BSD or GNU diff.

I also just found out that there are versions of diff and patch for sbase. However, they're not in the main source code repository for sbase. You can find the source by searching the dev list from suckless.org. The sbase diff appears to be fully POSIX compliant. It's missing several features that were added to BSD and GNU diff programs. It supports unified diff only. The output is very close to the output of the BSD diff utility and it also uses the longest common subsequence algorithm.

I did run across the code to convert between diff standard output and unified diff output:
https://github.com/AceHusky12/unidiff
It's listed as public domain.

If anyone else is using an unusual variant of diff or patch or is writing their own, I'd be very interested in hearing about. I would love to compare notes on some of the different BSD variants out there and the various features they support.

Whether you celebrate 8 days of Hanukkah, 12 days of Christmas, 7 days of Kwanzaa or anything else, it's always nice to have presents. With supply chains backed up and health hazards of shopping in crowded locations, this year is a great time to consider homemade presents.

I know many believe you get what you pay for me and that homemade gifts are not worthwhile. However, consider the time, effort and manpower that went into making a homemade gift. If you had to monetize it by paying someone else to do the work for you, with today's rising inflation, it would certainly cost a pretty penny to hire someone to do the job. Often a homemade gift has more intrinsic value that the latest cool commercial gadget or game.


Here are some gift ideas for the season...

Coloring

Coloring has been found to be a useful stress reduction activity. Give yourself the gift of a homemade coloring book using public domain clip art. You can also give your finished artwork or handmade holiday cards to others as a present.

Public Domain snowflake clip art to get you started:
https://www.rawpixel.com/board/1308894/vintage-snowflakes-wilson-alwyn-bentley-i-high-quality-cc0-images

Some other places to find artwork to color:
https://openclipart.org/faq
https://www.pdclipart.org/
https://publicdomainvectors.org/
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

You can also create your own designs to color with free programs like TuxPaint and mtPaint ( https://github.com/wjaguar/mtpaint_handbook ) and rgbPaint ( http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/rgbpaint.html ).

Exercise

Give yourself the gift of exercise. Why wait until your New Year's resolution to go to the gym when you can start exercising now and feel better for it? Studies have shown Vitamin D from sunlight can help protect against diseases ( https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/09/210915095408.htm ). Awe walks can have positive health effects and improve your mood more than walking just for the exercise ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32955293/ ). Try an early morning walk outside and enjoy the beauty of nature or try doing a Tai Chi form, QiGong exercise set or some yoga out in the sunshine. See how you feel afterwards.

Books

A book can be a wonderful gift.
Here's one of my favorite science fiction books:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18137
It even includes a furry protagonist. Hope others enjoy reading it as much as I did.

Here's a list of free books that could make nice presents:
https://lmemsm.dreamwidth.org/13112.html

Books don't have to be fictional to be fun. Check into the many wonderful public domain hobby related books such as recipe books available online. You can also create your own and share it with others.

Want to find more ideas for books to read? Check out the reviews at BookWyrm
( https://bookwyrm.social/ ) or share some of your own reviews. If the book you want to read is not in the public domain, check archive.org or online resources from your local library to see if they can help you access it.

Movies

Some movies and TV shows with well known characters are actually in the public domain. So if you're in the mood for a literally free movie, check some of these out.

Mysteries

https://archive.org/search.php?query=charlie+chan&and[]=mediatype%3A%22movies%22&and[]=year%3A%221973%22&and[]=year%3A%221966%22&and[]=year%3A%221949%22&and[]=year%3A%221948%22&and[]=year%3A%221945%22&and[]=year%3A%221943%22&and[]=year%3A%221942%22&and[]=year%3A%221941%22&and[]=year%3A%221940%22&and[]=year%3A%221939%22&and[]=year%3A%221938%22&and[]=year%3A%221937%22&and[]=year%3A%221936%22&and[]=year%3A%221934%22&and[]=year%3A%221931%22&and[]=year%3A%221917%22&and[]=subject%3A%22mystery%22&and[]=subject%3A%22Charlie%20Chan%22

Action and adventure

https://archive.org/search.php?query=superman&and[]=mediatype%3A%22movies%22&and[]=year%3A%221948%22&and[]=year%3A%221947%22&and[]=year%3A%221944%22&and[]=year%3A%221943%22&and[]=year%3A%221942%22&and[]=year%3A%221941%22&and[]=year%3A%221940%22&and[]=year%3A%221939%22&and[]=year%3A%221938%22&and[]=year%3A%221937%22&and[]=year%3A%221936%22&and[]=year%3A%221932%22&and[]=year%3A%221930%22&and[]=year%3A%221920%22&and[]=subject%3A%22superman%22

https://archive.org/details/TARZANOFTHEAPESPUBLICDOMAINVERSION
https://archive.org/details/silent-the-adventures-of-tarzan
https://archive.org/details/TheAdventuresOfTarzan1921USAedicinAmericana.3gp
https://archive.org/details/silent-the-son-of-tarzan

Science Fiction

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Flash%20Gordon%20Conquers%20the%20Universe%20taylor%20AND%20mediatype%3Amovies
https://archive.org/details/PurpleDeathFromOuterSpace

https://archive.org/details/planet_outlaws_ipod

You can find more movies and adventures by searching archive.org.
You can also look through the listings at this site:
https://www.openculture.com/freemoviesonline

Here's some information on a radio play based on a popular movie series which includes material from my favorite author:
https://www.openculture.com/2020/05/the-original-star-wars-trilogy-adapted-into-a-14-hour-radio-drama-by-npr-1981-1996.html

Stargazing

Stargazing gives you something to do with your time that's aesthetically pleasing and a good learning experience. You can find out about constellations, planets and moons.

To help you get started, here are some free programs for your PC and phone that can help guide your star search.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.tengel.planisphere/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.google.android.stardroid/
http://nightsky.sourceforge.net/
https://portableapps.com/de/apps/education/stellarium_portable
https://portableapps.com/apps/education/celestia_portable

Games

What good is a gift idea list without the mention of games? From Free, Libre and Open Source computer games for your electronic devices to Creative Commons and public domain books about how to play a wide variety of games, there are several great resources for finding and sharing free games.

Here's my list of educational games for computers and mobile devices:
https://lmemsm.dreamwidth.org/15912.html
Know of others? Please share them.

You can play games remotely via: https://www.freeboardgames.org/

Birding

Give to others by giving the birds a gift this year. You can create bird feeders from recycled materials. You can also start planning your gardens and include some bird, animal and environment friendly plants. The birds may even give you a gift in return with some beautiful bird songs.
You can watch birds anytime virtually:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/cams/cornell-lab-feederwatch/
It's also fun to learn how to identify the different types of birds that visit your neighborhood. Check out some of the free bird identification resources online such as public domain birding books and the e-bird program.

Giving to Others

Sometimes the best gift is sharing your time and skills with others.

This year, how about volunteering to help a Free, Libre, Open Source software project? You don't have to be a programmer to help out. They also need beta testers, artists, translators, help writing documentation and guides and help with other tasks. How fun would it be to beta test some computer games and be helping FLOSS projects at the same time?

There are also several Creative Commons projects in need of resources such as artwork, creative writing, multimedia recordings and more. You can add your creative works to a site featuring Creative Commons material using a CC license. You can also volunteer to help out various CC projects and web sites.

You can also help projects like these by advocating for them. Get involved with events like Software Freedom Day to help spread the word about great FLOSS and CC resources. Use FLOSS sites such as Get Together ( https://gettogether.community/ ) and Mobilizon ( https://instances.joinmobilizon.org/instances ) to share events. Use FLOSS programs ( https://lmemsm.dreamwidth.org/14124.html ) to host them virtually.

If you have a web site or blog or develop sites, help by making them more accessible. Find out more from projects like https://anybrowser.org/ and sites that discuss web accessibility such as 508E guidelines and A11Y best practices.

Continuous learning helps with brain health and neuroplasticity. Learn something new and help the world by volunteering your scientific skills. There are several citizen science projects in need of volunteers.

You can find more volunteer related links here:
https://lmemsm.dreamwidth.org/18603.html


Wrapping Up

Those are some of my gift ideas for now. You can also check earlier posts for holiday ideas from previous years. If you have other free resources you recommend, I'd enjoy hearing about them. Give a gift this year by sharing your own ideas, creativity and resources with others.

I was tasked at work to find some monitoring tools for AIX. I'm familiar with AIX Toolbox and a few third party repositories. I wanted to build some programs from source code. I use a lot of portable programs and can port them to wide variety of platforms including AIX. However, monitoring tools in general are usually not too portable.

We already have nmon on the system. I also found source code for a related program njmon, but it's mostly for gathering statistics and then some kind of reporting utilities are needed to make sense of the data. I looked for top, but couldn't find it. Read that topas is available instead. I couldn't locate any source code for topas, so I guessed it was closed source. Just confirmed that. It's based on nmon for AIX code which is closed source. So nmon in AIX is not Open Source either. I would prefer to use Open Source tools so the source code can be modified if needed and so I can maintain and patch the software if necessary. Decided to try to build htop and it built on AIX with some patching. However, it didn't display anything and said platform unsupported. I found some old patches for AIX for an older version of htop that's not even in the current htop repository. I was able to incorporate the older patches into the latest version and get system related information to display. I contacted the htop project, but they're not at all interested in adding AIX support even if patches to do so are supplied to them. So, I'm debating whether to use a patched htop on AIX or whether I should look for another utility that can do a similar job but would be a better option for AIX systems. I found an old version of top that had AIX 5 support. It works fine on AIX pretty much as is. I've used saidar on BSD systems. It's part of libgrabstat. It built fine from source on AIX. I know there's an uptime utility on the system, but it should also be fairly easy to create a simple, portable uptime program that would work on a variety of platforms including AIX and Windows.

We also installed nano on AIX at some point. I think it's been removed from the AIX Toolbox since then. It's an old version of nano and seems rather buggy. When using nano via ssh, the scrolling gets really messed up. Rebuilt nano from a later version of the source code. It seems to work fine.

I'll be looking for other command line utilities that are somewhat portable and may work on AIX. Will add the results of my search here. If anyone runs across some useful tools that have AIX support or that port easily to AIX, please let me know. If anyone's interested in sharing code, patches or programs, contact me. Would also be very interested to hear what FLOSS programs others are using often on AIX systems.