Sjoerd Simons has published a blog post about running Debian on the OpenWrt One router hardware:
With openwrt-one-debian, you can now install and run a full Debian system leveraging the OpenWrt One's NVMe storage, enabling everything from custom services and containers to development tools and lightweight server workloads, all on open hardware.
This project provides a rust-based flasher to install Debian on the OpenWrt One, opening the door to standard Debian tooling, packages, and workflows. For developers and power users, it transforms the OpenWrt One from a network appliance into a compact, general-purpose Linux system.
See the GitHub repository for the code and latest build. LWN reviewed the device in November 2024, and covered Denver Gingerich's talk at SCALE 22x about the making of the router in March 2025.
Version 14.0 of the Forgejo software forge has been released. Notable changes in this release include several database improvements, new options for approving actions execution from pull requests, a new file editor, and progress toward making Forgejo's web UI work without JavaScript.
We have recently noticed that email from LWN.net seems to be blocked by MXroute. Unfortunately, the company also does not seem to have a way for non-customers to report problems in mail delivery, so we have no good way to get ourselves unblocked.
As a result, readers who have subscribed to an LWN mailing list from a domain hosted with MXroute will probably not receive our mailings. We have not yet unsubscribed addresses that are being blocked by MXroute, but will soon if the problem persists. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience; it is unfortunate that it is becoming so difficult to send legitimate email as a small business.
The Debian GNOME team would like to remove the GTK 2 graphics toolkit, which has been unmaintained upstream for more than five years, and ship Debian 14 ("forky") without it. As one might expect, however, there are those who would like to find a way to keep it. Despite its age and declared obsolescence, quite a few Debian packages still depend on GTK 2. Many of those applications are unlikely to be updated, and users are not eager to give them up. Discussion about how to handle this is ongoing; it seems likely that Debian developers will find some way to continue supporting applications that require GTK 2, but users may have to look outside official Debian repositories.
Version 1.6.0 of the Radicle peer-to-peer, local-first code collaboration stack has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for systemd credentials, use of Rust's clap crate for parsing command-line arguments, and more. LWN covered the project in March 2024.
Version 147.0 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for the XDG Base Directory specification, enabling local network access restrictions for users with enhanced tracking protection (ETP) set to "Strict", and a fix that improves Firefox's rendering with GNOME on fractionally scaled displays. Firefox 147 also includes a number of security fixes, including several sandbox-escape vulnerabilities.
In open-source circles there are many situations, such as bug reports, demos, and tutorials, when one might want to provide a play-by-play of a session in one's terminal. The asciinema project provides a set of tools to do just that. Its tools let users record, edit, and share terminal sessions in a text-based format that has quite a few advantages compared to making and sharing videos of terminal sessions. For example, it is easy to use, offers the ability to search text from recorded sessions, and allows users to copy and paste directly from the recording.
The Fedora Project has announced the results of the Fedora 43 election cycle. Five seats were open on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners are Kevin Fenzi, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Timothée Ravier, Dave Cantrell, and Máirín Duffy.
Gentoo Linux has published a 2025 project retrospective that looks at how the community has evolved, changes to the distribution, infrastructure, and finances for the Gentoo Foundation.
Gentoo currently consists of 31663 ebuilds for 19174 different packages. For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of binary packages available on the mirrors. Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for different processor architectures and system configurations, with an overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date.
The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025, with a slight decrease from 123942 to 112927. The number of commits by external contributors was 9396, now across 377 unique external authors.
The European Commission has opened a "call for evidence" to help shape its European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy. The commission is looking to reduce its dependence on software from non-EU countries:
The EU faces a significant problem of dependence on non-EU countries in the digital sphere. This reduces users' choice, hampers EU companies' competitiveness and can raise supply chain security issues as it makes it difficult to control our digital infrastructure (both physical and software components), potentially creating vulnerabilities including in critical sectors. In the last few years, it has been widely acknowledged that open source – which is a public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed – has the strong potential to underpin a diverse portfolio of high-quality and secure digital solutions that are valid alternatives to proprietary ones. By doing so, it increases user agency, helps regain control and boost the resilience of our digital infrastructure.
The feedback period runs until midnight (Brussels time)
February 3, 2026. The commission seeks input from all interested
stakeholders, "in particular the European open-source community
(including individual contributors, open-source companies and
foundations), public administrations, specialised business sectors,
the ICT industry, academia and research institutions
".
Last year we revived the tradition of publishing a timeline of notable events from the previous year. Since that seemed to go over well, we decided we should continue the practice and look back on some of the most noteworthy events and releases of 2025.
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