Hurd & Guix Were Among The GNU Projects Making Progress This Year

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 28 December 2014 at 03:47 AM EST. Add A Comment
GNU
2014 wasn't the year of the GNU/Hurd desktop, but nevertheless this nearly 25 year old micro-kernel made more progress this year. The GNU Guix package manager also made interesting process this year along with the many other associated GNU projects.

The latest of my year-end lists is the top ten most viewed GNU news stories of 2014. This list is comprised of GNU project news not belonging to any other Phoronix news categories (like the GCC stories belonging in the compiler section).

Here's the exciting GNU stuff of this year:

GNU Hurd Is Enjoying User-Space Device Drivers
In the name of freedom, GNU Hurd has the ability to run device drivers from user-space via the project's DDE layer. DDE is an interesting feature and does allow for some interesting possibilities although conventional wisdom advises against accessing and controlling your GPU, network, and disk drivers, along with other components, from user-space. This also includes running Linux kernel drivers in Hurd's user-space.

GRUB 2.02 Has Many Features, Might Hit Ubuntu 14.04
Development of GRUB 2.02 has been going well for well over one year and at least some Canonical developers are hoping to land the Free Software Foundation's updated boot-loader into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS even if it means using a development version for the time being.

GNU Guix Package Manager Looks To Grow
The GNU Guix package manager / distribution system is still active in development and the developers have planned a road-map to reaching version 1.0.

GNU Octave 3.8 With Its GUI Officially Announced
Several days ago I had written about GNU Octave 3.8, the latest major update to the open-source high-level numerical computational language commonly used in replacement of MATLAB. Back then I wrote about the features and that the official release was available from the FTP server, while a few hours ago the official release finally took place.

FSF Issues Their Rebuttal To Apple's New iPhone, Watch & Apple Pay
John Sullivan, the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation, has commented on Apple's much anticipated launch of the iPhone 6, Apple Pay, and the brand new product line: the Apple Watch.

Wget 1.15 Supports Perfect-Forward Secrecy, MD5-SESS
Version 1.15 of the popular GNU Wget downloading tool for HTTP, FTP, and other Internet protocols is now available. Wget 1.15 brings with it many new features.

GNU Emacs Finally Switching Over To Git From Bazaar
GNU Emacs is finally in the process of transitioning to Git for their revision control system rather than GNU Bazaar.

FSF Talks Up Libreboot As New Coreboot Downstream
Libreboot is a de-blobbed version of Coreboot designed to run on the Free Software Foundation's first endorsed laptop.

Glibc 2.19 Adds New Features, Many Bug Fixes
The latest version of the GNU C Library is now available. At version 2.19, glibc adds many new features and other improvements.

GDB 7.8 Betters Python Scripting, Adds Guile Support
Version 7.8 of the GNU Debugger is now available with a variety of enhancements.

Find other recent GNU news here.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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