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Echoes #202619: y2026, w19

Weekly Echoes #2026W19: IT news, round-up, week 19; from 05/04 to 05/10.

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Agenda

⇒ (05/06) Open Source Experience 2026

The must-attend event for open source and digital sovereignty

⇒ (05/06) Lomiri Tech Meeting: A Free Open Source Mobile Dev Hackathon is Coming to the Netherlands on May 16

Lomiri Hackathon: Building the Future of Open-Source Mobile Apps in Tilburg’s Historic Heart

App

⇒ (05/06) Home Assistant 2026.5!

What a few weeks it has been! Earlier this month, we hosted State of the Open Home 2026 live in Utrecht, the Netherlands. A big chunk of that day was dedicated to something we deeply care about: building in the open, and how we’re going to take that even further from here on out. 💙

Hardware

⇒ (05/05) BEGA joins Works with Home Assistant

How do you more or less double the number of Works with Home Assistant-certified devices available to our community? Have BEGA join the program! This German firm has spent more than 75 years designing a wide range of architectural lighting that sets the industry standard: and now they’re bringing that expertise to your smart home…

⇒ (05/06) The Bean is here!

Today, we’re releasing a brand new, open-source mouse design: the Bean, which is a pointing stick mouse (also called a nub mouse). Nub mice are commonly found in laptops in the center of the keyboard. The Bean takes that concept and pushes it farther than anybody’s ever pushed it.

IT

⇒ (05/04) blight : Backlight Idle Daemon for FreeBSD/KDE/Plasma/Wayland

blight is a FreeBSD-native backlight idle python script (written with the goldfish brain) running as a user daemon for KDE Plasma on Wayland. It dims the screen to 0 after a configurable idle timeout and restores it on any trackpad or TrackPoint input : talking directly to /dev/psm0 and /dev/backlight/backlight0. No D-Bus. No logind. No powerdevil…

⇒ (05/05) What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #60 – S3E12 Packaging, Transferring, and Deploying Software in Air-Gapped Environments with Zarf

Host Sally Cooper is joined by Brandt Keller, a Staff Software Engineer at Defense Unicorns and Maintainer of the OpenSSF Sandbox Project, Zarf. Brandt discusses Zarf’s origins as a tool designed to reliably package, transfer, and deploy software components (like container images and Helm charts) specifically for critical, air-gapped environments that lack internet connectivity. The conversation explores Zarf’s evolution, highlighting its current role in introducing security gates, improving transparency, and consolidating various management and SBOM tools into a single, declarative workflow. Finally, Brandt explains how Zarf’s declarative manifest model is helping to secure open source software by reducing the cognitive burden on maintainers and giving integrators confidence in upstream artifacts.

⇒ (05/05) Setting Up snac2 on OpenBSD

A guide on deploying a lightweight, C-based ActivityPub instance using snac2 on an OpenBSD stack.

⇒ (05/06) OpenBSD stories—OpenBSD/cats: the enabler

During the 1990s, some users of home computers wanted to be able to run a Unix-like operating system on their machines.

⇒ (05/06) Digital Cameras, Linux, and BSD

Using Your Digital Camera…

⇒ (05/06) Security does not block projects. Ambiguity does.

Cybersecurity is often blamed for slowing projects down. But in the field, what really blocks projects is unclear rules, opaque processes, unknown timelines, and poorly defined responsibilities.

⇒ (05/06) FreeBSD: After the First Boot

After the first boot of my new FreeBSD installation, these are some extra steps I like to make right away to get a system off to a good start!

⇒ (05/07) Yazi is the Terminal-based File Manager I Didn’t Know I Needed

There are two kinds of Linux users. Those who live in the comfort of GUI and those who live in the adventurous world of terminal.

⇒ (05/07) Monitor your devices with LibreNMS on FreeBSD

LibreNMS has been a faithful companion for years now. It quietly handles the monitoring of my servers, devices, and services without demanding much in return - exactly what you want from a tool whose job is to watch over everything else. It’s a solid alternative to heavier solutions like Zabbix, and it gives you alerts, data, and graphs on virtually anything reachable over SNMP.

⇒ (05/07) BSD Now—662: I need a hero

Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now, Compensating for RAM Constraints with L2ARC on ZFS, GhostBSD 26.1, and more…

⇒ (05/07) The Road to Gold: How CPS Set a New Standard for Security and Quality in Open Source

In the world of open source, trust is our most valuable currency. ONAP is a “collection of individual, semi-standalone network automation functions that provide design, orchestration, observability, and automation of network and edge services for operators, cloud providers, and enterprises” (per ONAP). When we build software that powers global telecommunications, “good enough” isn’t an option.

⇒ (05/08) The Unix Family of Operating Systems

The Unix family includes a range of similar operating systems with some common characteristics. Formally, “Unix” means just those that have been certified as conforming to the Single Unix Specification. But practically, “Unix” is used as a generic term. Companies selling the commercial variants have used other names to distinguish their product—Sun (since purchased by Oracle) wants you to just buy Solaris, HP offers HP-UX, DEC developed Tru64 (and after being purchased by Compaq and then by HP, they still get more requests for Tru64 than HP-UX), IBM offers AIX, Silicon Graphics developed Irix, and so on.

⇒ (05/09) Debian Stable With Newer Software—The Fast Forward Repository

A way for Debian users to peek into the future…

⇒ (05/09) BSD-NL Conference Early 2026 - Eirik Øverby - On DOS, floppies, NetBSD and nostalgia

⇒ (05/09) Unlocking Encrypted ZFS Volumes with a Passkey

Using Revaulter to safely unlock encrypted ZFS volumes at boot with WebAuthn and PRF

⇒ (05/10) FreeBSD pkgbase Minor Upgrades

The pkgbase way of things on FreeBSD is still not fully mature (and officially marked as experimental). I tried to cover all PKGBASE things in the Brave New PKGBASE World article but I need to add one another thing.

⇒ (05/10) Debian Release Team: Debian Must Now Ship Reproducible Packages

With half-way through the Debian 14 “Forky” development cycle, the Debian release team is out with an update this weekend and some big news…

⇒ (05/10) Both Fedora and Ubuntu will get AI support – soon

Both Ubuntu and Fedora have made it official: support is coming soon for running local generative AI instances.

⇒ (05/10) Let’s Learn Linux: Customize and use the shell environment

Security

⇒ (05/08) Dirty Frag: Universal Linux LPE

This document describes the Dirty Frag vulnerability class, first discovered and reported by Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel), which can obtain root privileges on major Linux distributions by chaining the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write (CVE-2026-43284) vulnerability and the RxRPC Page-Cache Write (CVE-2026-43500) vulnerability.

⇒ (05/09) JDownloader site hacked to replace installers with Python RAT malware

The website for the popular JDownloader download manager was compromised earlier this week to distribute malicious Windows and Linux installers, with the Windows payload found deploying a Python-based remote access trojan.

Society

⇒ (05/06) Open Infrastructure Is Not Free, Part II: The Hidden Cost of Running Package Registries

The September 2025 Working Together Towards Sustainable Open Source open letter raised the alarm about the economic sustainability of open source package registries, highlighting how rising adoption and the pace of innovation are placing new and growing pressures on open source package registries. Those pressures have only accelerated in the time since the letter, amplified by the adoption of AI coding agents and tools.

⇒ (05/07) LibreOffice Questions Whether Euro-Office is Truly Sovereign

Before we dive into the topic at hand, you should know that Euro-Office is a new European productivity project by Nextcloud and IONOS, which was forked from ONLYOFFICE.