Turris Omnia NG Wired is a Fanless, Rack-Ready OpenWrt Router with Dual 10G Ports

Most consumer routers give you a locked-down firmware, a few years of updates if you are lucky, and a web UI that makes you miss the terminal.

Routers powered by OpenWrt are a breath of fresh air here, as they give users a full Linux system, a proper package manager, support for VPNs, and the freedom to actually configure their network the way they want.

CZ.NIC, the organization behind the Czech Republic's national domain registry, which also does network security research, has the Turris line of OpenWrt-powered routers built to offer security, modularity, and long-term support.

Late last year, they launched the Turris Omnia NG, a router with Wi-Fi 7, swappable M.2 Wi-Fi modules, and a quad-core ARM processor. Now they are back with the Turris Omnia NG Wired, which does away with the built-in Wi-Fi and is designed for rack-mount installations.

📝 Turris Omnia NG Wired: Key Specifications

The front and back views of the Turris Omnia NG Wired.

The Omnia NG Wired runs Turris OS, a Linux distribution based on OpenWrt that ships with a web UI for easy router management and handles system updates automatically.

On the hardware side, a quad-core ARMv8 processor running at 2.2 GHz drives the device, backed by 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of eMMC storage. CZ.NIC went with passive cooling for this one too, so there are no fans or noise to worry about.

For connectivity, you get two 10 Gbps SFP+ ports, one for WAN, one for LAN, and four 2.5 Gbps RJ45 ports for local devices.

Michal Hrušecký, head of hardware development at CZ.NIC, notes that:

In addition to 10G and 2.5G ports, we also considered expandability. Thanks to M.2 slots, you can add NVMe storage or mobile connectivity as a backup, for example.

This makes Omnia NG Wired a flexible foundation that can be adapted to specific deployments.

Additionally, the front panel has a 240x240 px IPS display for network stats and a D-pad for navigation, and the USB 3.0 ports round things out.

If wireless coverage is eventually needed, a Wi-Fi 6/Wi-Fi 7 upgrade kit is supposed to be made available separately (couldn't find its listing), so the wired-only design is not a permanent constraint. And with CZ.NIC's long-term support promise, updates to the device will continue well past the 10-year mark.

🛒 Get Yours

Prices for the Turris Omnia NG Wired range from €420 to €499, depending on the retailer you go for. The official website lists the authorized sellers who cater to different regions.

Turris Omnia NG Wired

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/KPdfIU5
via IFTTT

Big Win for Open Source as Germany Backs Open Document Format

Germany has strictly standardized its digital document requirements. The Deutschland-Stack (in Deutsch), the country's new sovereign digital infrastructure framework, names just two document formats that public administrations are allowed to use: ODF and PDF/UA.

Proprietary document formats from Microsoft like .doc, .ppt, and .xls are not included.

What's happening?

The framework is published by Germany's Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation, and it covers every level of public administration in the country, from federal government bodies down to states and municipalities.

Also keep in mind that the rollout of key infrastructure components is targeted for 2028.

ODF, or OpenDocument Format, is an XML-based file format for office documents. It covers text files, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. The standard is maintained by OASIS and is also an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300), which means it is vendor-neutral and not controlled by any single company.

PDF/UA, short for PDF/Universal Accessibility, is the ISO accessibility standard for PDF files (ISO 14289). It lays out specs that make PDF documents readable by assistive technologies like screen readers, making it a sensible choice for a government that has to serve a diverse population.

The reasons behind this are not hard to understand. Vendor lock-in is the obvious one.

When public administrations run on proprietary document formats, they end up dependent on the vendor that controls those formats, with no real way out without significant disruption and cost.

The Deutschland-Stack explicitly calls this out, with reducing lock-in effects listed as one of its core goals. The framework also prioritizes use of open source solutions where possible, and explicitly favors sourcing from European providers over foreign alternatives.

Speaking on the subject, Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of The Document Foundation, stated that:

This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate. Germany’s decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years: open, vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates.

They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations.

Closing Words

Moves like this take time to matter, but they do matter. Governments adopting open standards at this scale sends a clear signal about where things are heading, and it makes the case for interoperable, vendor-neutral infrastructure in a way that no amount of social media preaching can.

Germany doing this in a binding, nationwide framework is a meaningful step, and the rest of Europe would benefit if they took note of this.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/Z9fkuL5
via IFTTT

Systemd’s New Feature Brings Age Verification Option to Linux

If you have not been living under a rock, then you most likely know that age verification has been all over tech news lately, and the conversation surrounding it is a mess with a lot of information and misinformation flowing around.

For people who are trying to understand what's going on, the TLDR is that laws in regions like California, Colorado, and Brazil now require operating systems to report age signals to apps and app stores.

systemd, the init system and service manager used by most major Linux distributions, has made a change tied to this whole situation, but it is probably not what you are imagining.

What's going on?

The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil.

This is the same record that already holds basic user metadata like realName, emailAddress, and location. The field stores a full date in YYYY-MM-DD format and can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves.

Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has clarified that this change is:

An optional field in the userdb JSON object. It's not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it's standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it's entirely optional.

In simple words, this is something that adds a new, optional field that can then be used by other open source projects like xdg-desktop-portal to build age verification compliance on top of, without systemd itself doing anything with the data or making it mandatory to provide.

A merge request asking for this change to be repealed was struck down by Lennart, who gave the above-mentioned reasoning behind this, and further noted that people were misunderstanding what systemd is trying to do here.

So yeah, that is what this change looks like, but this won't be stopping the haters and conspiracy theorists from making wild accusations, of course. Let's see how this develops.

---

Suggested Read 📖: Systemd creator quits Microsoft

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/087HbVl
via IFTTT

Vykar is a New Open Source Backup Tool That's Faster Than Borg, Restic, and Kopia

If you want to backup your data on Linux, there's no shortage of reliable options that offer some pretty good functionality. We have Déjà Dup that handles the basics well if you just want a simple GNOME app that protects your files without much fuss.

Timeshift takes a different angle; it snapshots your system so you can roll back after a bad update, though it's not really designed for personal data backups.

For users who want more control, Borg and Restic have been the standards for years. Both are encrypted, deduplicated, and trusted by a vast community of Linux users.

BorgBase, on the other hand, is a managed repository hosting service for Borg and Restic backups that has been around for almost a decade. Vykar is their newest project—an open source encrypted backup tool that's worth a look if you're in the market for something new.

🚧

This tool is not recommended for production use by the developers; proceed with care.

Vykar: Overview ⭐

Vykar is an open source, encrypted, deduplicated backup tool written in Rust, developed by the BorgBase team, and released under the GPL-3.0 license. It draws inspiration from the likes of BorgBackup and Borgmatic but uses its own repository format, making it incompatible with existing Borg or Restic repositories.

The whole thing is configured through a single YAML file where you define your repositories, source directories, encryption settings, and retention policy.

Key features include:

• Scheduling via vykar daemon.
• Deduplication is doable via FastCDC.
• Compression support with LZ4 or Zstandard.
• Desktop GUI (vykar-gui) with system tray support.
• WebDAV server for browsing and restoring snapshots.
• Encryption with AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 (auto-selected), and Argon2id key derivation.
• Concurrent multi-client backups, where multiple machines can write to the same backup repository at the same time.

The desktop GUI deserves a particular mention. Borg relies on third-party tools like Vorta for a desktop interface, and Restic has Backrest, which is also a community project. Vykar ships its own GUI as a first-party component.

It reads directly from vykar.yaml, runs backups on demand, and can sit in the system tray running scheduled backups in the background.

As for the performance, the project's website has put up a comparison of Vykar against Borg, Restic, Rustic, and Kopia, tested against a 49 GiB dataset of 367,000 files.

📋

These are benchmarks run and published by the Vykar team, not an independent party.

On backup duration, Vykar finished in 61 seconds, Rustic took 313, Borg 268, Restic 138, and Kopia 85. Restore times follow a similar pattern where Vykar does it in 69 seconds, versus 82 for Rustic, 225 for Borg, 130 for Restic, and 132 for Kopia.

CPU efficiency shows the clearest gap. Vykar used 234 CPU seconds for backup, compared to Borg's 250, Restic's 696, Rustic's 728, and Kopia's 428.

Memory usage is where the picture gets more interesting. Borg uses just 236 MB during backup versus Vykar's 623 MB. Restic is also lighter at 327 MB. So Vykar is trading some RAM for its speed advantage. This is something to factor in on memory-constrained systems.

Repository sizes across all five tools land between 19.7 and 19.9 GB under equivalent Zstd compression settings, so deduplication efficiency is roughly comparable across the board.

Get Vykar 📥

Before you install, know that Vykar supports four storage backends: the local filesystem, S3-compatible object storage (any provider works), SFTP, and a dedicated REST server.

The installation itself is a one-liner:

curl -fsSL https://vykar.borgbase.com/install.sh | sh

Pre-built binaries for Linux (x86_64 and aarch64, both glibc and musl), macOS (Apple Silicon), and Windows are also available on the GitHub releases page.

From there, you can refer to the quickstart guide for going through the creation of a config file and initializing the backup process.

Vykar

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/vCBGzLm
via IFTTT

FOSS Weekly #26.12: GNOME 50 Release, Fedora for Apple, New Ageless Linux, Manjaro Drama and More

In the previous newsletter, I discussed how various distros are handling the age verification laws. At the end of the article, I speculated that we would see a few existing or new distros coming up with "no age verification" as their unique feature.

Guess what? We have a new distro called Ageless Linux which is created specifically to refuse compliance with OS-level age verification laws.

But it's more than just a distro; the project also maintains a tracker of where various distros and organizations stand on age verification and a $12 RISC-V hardware project aimed at putting non-compliant devices in the hands of schoolchildren. I am glad that it exists.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• Things you can do Linux but not on Windows
• Chrome on ARM Linux (aka Raspberry Pi).
• A new web browser for Linux users.
• GNOME 50 and Fedora Ashahi releases
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux and Open Source News

GNOME 50 is here and X11 is not. Wayland is all the way in this new release. Upcoming distros like Ubuntu 26.04 and Fedora 44 will have it. Rolling distros like Arch should also get it soon.

Google has officially announced Chrome for ARM64 Linux, with a release targeted for Q2 2026. That means Raspberry Pi users, Snapdragon laptop owners, and anyone else running ARM hardware will get the Chrome experience on Linux.

Although, not open source, Kagi's Orion browser has made it to Linux as a public beta, and it's genuinely interesting because it's one of the browsers on the platform not built on Chromium or Firefox's engine. It is based on WebKit and works okayish on GNOME.

A significant chunk of the Manjaro team has gone public with the "Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto," signed by 19 members, calling for the project to separate from its parent company and restructure as a nonprofit.

Fedora Asahi Remix 43 arrives with Mac Pro support. In case you did not know, Asahi is the project bring Linux to Apple's Silicon processors.

AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta etc have put $12.5M into Open Source Security, managed by Linux Foundation. This is funny in a way. They are putting together a fund to fix the problem their AI tools created in the first place.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Google wants every Android developer to register using their real identity before their apps will install on certified devices, but not everyone's on board.

YOUR support keeps us going, keeps us resisting the established media and tech, keeps us independent. And it costs less than a McDonald's Happy Meal.

Opt for the Plus membership to:

✅ Get 5 FREE eBooks on Linux, Docker and Bash
✅ Enjoy an ad-free reading experience
✅ Flaunt badges in the comment section and forum
✅ To support creation of educational Linux materials

Join It's FOSS Plus

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

A clean beginner's guide to Markdown covering the core syntax: headings, text formatting, links, images, lists, and block quotes. It comes with a downloadable cheat sheet and a few recommendations for online editors if you want to try it without installing anything.

Windows users have been conditioned to ask, "But can Linux do X?" This piece by Roland flips it around and asks what Linux can do that Windows can't. The answers range from practical (live sessions, moving installs between machines, reviving old hardware) to genuinely impressive (swapping kernels, choosing filesystems, replacing every layer of your stack).

📚 eBook bundle on AI

Inside this 20+ eBook library, you’ll gain expert insights from practical lessons like Learn Python Programming, 4E and the LLM Engineer's Handbook. These massively efficient tools save you time and effort so you can prioritize other important tasks and systems.

Your purchase supports the World Central Kitchen organization.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

If your Raspberry Pi homelab is freezing up under load, the default 200 MB swap is probably the first thing worth looking at.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

If your GNOME top panel has turned into a wall of icons, Veil is worth a look. It's a shell extension that lets you hide panel items behind a toggle arrow.

📽️ Videos for You

You could move away from Google today if you wanted to, and DuckDuckGo is one of the good ones to consider.

Subscribe to It's FOSS YouTube Channel

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In Nautilus file manager, you can press CTRL+F to start a search in the current directory and CTRL+SHIFT+F to search across the other system folders. To go even further, you can add new search locations via the Search settings.

0:00

/0:14

And, if you use the shortcut CTRL+ALT+O after selecting a file or folder, you can go to it's location in the file manager. Do note that this works in the Search and Recent pages of the file manager.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Do you know the brain behind Debian? This Ian Murdock quiz will test your knowledge.

🤣 Meme of the Week: We must protect it at all costs!

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On March 17, 1988, Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement over the look and feel of the Windows GUI. Apple's argument was that Windows borrowed too heavily from the Macintosh interface it had debuted in 1984. The case dragged on for years before a judge ruled that Apple had only limited rights to the design elements in question.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: One of our regular Pro FOSSers is having an issue with CUPS on antiX Linux; can you help?

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/X8WdDLt
via IFTTT

Fedora Asahi Remix 43 Arrives with Mac Pro Support and Beats Fedora to a Key Upgrade

Fedora Asahi Remix is a collaboration between the Fedora Asahi SIG and the Asahi Linux project that has brought Fedora Linux to Apple Silicon Macs. While I have personally never used it, I have seen its development progress consistently.

Each release has closed more hardware gaps, brought the experience closer to what you would expect on native hardware, and stayed in sync with mainline Fedora. Its latest release keeps that momentum going.

🆕 Fedora Asahi Remix 43: A Packed Release

Source: Fedora Magazine

Based on Fedora 43, this release of Fedora Asahi Remix 43 takes advantage of Linux kernel 6.17 and comes with KDE Plasma 6.6 as the desktop environment.

The latter is the flagship desktop that has introduced quite a few useful upgrades. One of the more practical ones is the OCR support in Spectacle. You can now pull text directly from a screenshot, making it helpful for situations where you need to copy something out of an image or a terminal error you cannot select.

Accessibility also sees many additions. Plasma Keyboard is the brand new on-screen keyboard that replaces the older solution, and a grayscale filter has been added to the Color Blindness Correction options in System Settings.

Just a stand-in image of KDE Plasma 6.6.

Beyond that, it also introduces Plasma Setup, a first-run wizard that handles user account creation separately from OS installation. This should come in handy for anyone setting up a new machine.

A GNOME variant is also available, featuring GNOME 49, which comes with new default apps, shell upgrades, and file manager refinements.

Both desktop variants benefit from RPM 6.0, which delivers some security-focused changes like full fingerprint-based OpenPGP key identification, multiple signatures per package, and OpenPGP v6 support with post-quantum cryptography.

Then there is the inclusion of the DNF5 backend that ensures Plasma Discover and GNOME Software now use the same underlying package management plumbing as everything else on the system. This specific change has yet to arrive on mainline Fedora and is on track for a Fedora 44 debut.

Hardware support also sees work, with the Mac Pro now being a supported device, and users of M2 Pro and M2 Max-powered MacBooks now getting functional microphones. There's also 120Hz refresh rate support for the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 models.

📥 Get Fedora Asahi Remix 43

All you need is a single command to get Fedora Asahi Remix installed on your Mac device. But you have to take note that this distro only works on Apple Silicon Macs running at least macOS 13.5 or 14.2.

curl https://fedora-asahi-remix.org/install | sh

Fedora Asahi Remix 43

Existing users, you will have to follow the upgrade guide for Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop to get this release on your computer. If you are on the GNOME variant, then you will have to use DNF to get this release.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/KvrydMT
via IFTTT

AI Companies Put $12.5M Into Open Source Security to Fix a Problem Their Tools Helped Create

The Linux Foundation has announced $12.5 million in grants to strengthen open source software security. The funding will be managed by Alpha-Omega and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), two of its security-focused initiatives.

The idea behind this move is to tackle the growing problem of AI tools generating security findings (both legit and hallucination ones) at a scale open source maintainers simply cannot keep up with.

We already know that many open source projects don't have the resources or tooling to handle such a flood of reports. Combined with the other development-related issues they have to tackle, a project could be in real trouble if they are overwhelmed with AI slop.

Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF plan to work directly with maintainers to make sure whatever security tooling comes out of this is actually practical and fits into how their projects already work. The goal is to help them stay on top of growing security demands without getting completely buried.

The AI giants who have pitched in include the likes of:

• Anthropic
• AWS
• Google
• Google DeepMind
• GitHub
• Microsoft
• OpenAI

On this, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Foundation Fellow and Linux kernel maintainer, said:

Grant funding alone is not going to help solve the problem that AI tools are causing today on open source security teams. OpenSSF has the active resources needed to support numerous projects that will help these overworked maintainers with the triage and processing of the increased AI-generated security reports they are currently receiving.

This is not unfounded

Back in 2025, cURL's bug bounty program on HackerOne got hit with a wave of AI-generated reports. These were not real vulnerability findings, just a vomit of unresearched submissions that people were clearly generating with AI and sending off without actually understanding what they were reporting.

cURL's creator, Daniel Stenberg, initially tried to push back. He warned that anyone submitting AI slop would get publicly named, ridiculed, and banned. That did not really help. By January 2026, the project had already gone through 20 submissions in the first few weeks alone.

So, the cURL bug bounty program was shut down entirely. I am betting that the developers are putting all this saved effort and time into tackling more productive tasks.

📋

If you didn't know, cURL is an important building block of the modern IT infrastructure used by billions of devices worldwide.

Of course this funding grant does not fully remedy the problem of AI slop for open source projects, but it is at least a step in the right direction. These deep-pocketed AI giants need to do better, and hopefully this sets a precedent.

---

Suggested Read 📖: Linux Market Share Statistics

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/Jj0ucUa
via IFTTT