I'm a tournament organizer for a local Smash tournament. We normally host our brackets on start.gg. However, the site is pretty unreliable. Occasionally, we've had to run the bracket on challonge.com instead. Recently, the venue wifi was having issues and we almost had to run it on our phones which wouldve been brutal. Every alternative I can find is either web-based or is commercial software for big E-sports events. I just need software on my laptop (I'm running Linux Mint, the other TO uses a MacBook) that can generate a double-elinination bracket based on a seeded list of entrants. After that, it should be able to track the bracket progress over the course of the event. This seems like a pretty simple concept but I haven't been able to find anything.

Welcome to the 47th week of Linuxiac’s 2025 Weekly Roundup — your go-to source for all things Linux & Open Source. Here’s a look at the biggest Linux and FOSS highlights from the past week (Nov 17 – 23).

I wonder that I didn't find any good quiz engine yet that is open source.

There are games like It's Quiz Time or You Don't Know Jack. There also are some web quiz platforms like Kahoot or MyQuiz that can be used for educational purpose too. The idea is that you get quiz questions on one device and players can vote with their mobile device. Depending on the software, it supports different varieties of questions.

Something like Tux Quiz would be nice, an open source project with community driven questions. What do you think? Does something like this already exist?

In addition to Valve contributing to the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for enhancing the Linux gaming experience and their AMD-powered Steam Deck, the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset is making use of Mesa's open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics.

Linux consulting firm Igalia who has long seen funded work from Valve wrote a blog post today to outline their recent efforts given last week's Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller announcement. Igalia highlighted the work they have been doing for the Steam Frame around FEX for x86/x86_64 emulation on ARM for the Qualcomm Snapdragon powered VR device. Plus the work done to Turnip for serving as the Vulkan driver on the Steam Frame

The Servo open-source web browser engine has been making good progress in recent times. Long outside the confines of Mozilla and working as a Linux Foundation Europe project, Servo has been advancing thanks to Igalia and other open-source developers while getting by on around ~$5.7k USD per month thanks mostly to donations from individuals. Servo has now announced sponsorship tiers in hopefully to solicit more donations from larger organizations.

Servo's sponsorship tiers announced today range from the "bronze" level at $100 USD per month up to the top-tier "platinum" level with $10k USD monthly contributions from organizations (or individuals). Those contributing at the different sponsorship tiers will be featured on the project's homepage.

The popular open-source e-book management tool, Calibre, has just released version 8.15, bringing improvements in the Comments editor, bug fixes, and updates to its news-source catalog.

The e-book viewer adds a small enhancement: hovering over a highlight now displays the date it was created. The Comments editor receives two updates focused on text handling. Case-change operations now preserve as much existing formatting as possible, improving accuracy when editing styled text.

In addition, new keyboard shortcuts have been introduced for all case-change actions. Users can select text, open the right-click menu, and view the new shortcut list.

Microsoft announced today that they're preserving a bit of history here - with Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III now officially and clearly open source. The source has been around for a while but now it's all proper.

From the announcement they said:

Today, we’re preserving a cornerstone of gaming history that is near and dear to our hearts. Together, Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), Team Xbox, and Activision are making Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III available under the MIT License. Our goal is simple: to place historically important code in the hands of students, teachers, and developers so they can study it, learn from it, and, perhaps most importantly, play it.

Wireshark, the world’s most popular network protocol analyzer, has been updated today to version 4.6.1, a minor point release to the latest and greatest Wireshark 4.6 series, addressing various bugs and updating protocol support.

Wireshark 4.6.1 is here to update support for the 802.11 Radiotap, AC DR, ASN.1 BER, ASN.1 PER, BPv7, BT L2CAP, CFM, Darwin, DNS, DTLS, EAPOL-MKA, HTTP, HTTP3, ISObus VT, KRB5, LTP, NAS-EPS, NETDFS, NMEA 0183, P1, RPC_NETLOGON, RTSE, SGP.22, SGP.32, SMB, SNMP, TCP, TECMP, TFTP, VLAN, WINREG, X509AF, X509SAT, and ZBD protocols.

Wanna hear a joke about construction? I am still working on it🤣

Why did the developer go broke? Because he ran out of cache 🤣

Beginning yesterday and continuing today are several patch series beginning to lay the foundation in the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver for enabling some next-generation graphics IP. Due to the AMD graphics driver block by block enablement strategy and IP-based discovery adopted by their driver over the past few years, it's not clear what this new hardware enablement is for whether it's RDNA5 / UDNA or some RDNA4 refresh. In any event, the Linux driver enablement has begun.

Yesterday saw the PSP 15.0.8 IP posted. Not much is revealed by this updated Platform Security Processor (PSP) block and an incremental revision over what's already supported by the AMDGPU driver. The Platform Security Processor block on AMD GPU hardware handles firmware validation and other low-level security-related tasks.

Recordings from the GStreamer Conference 2025, held in London in late October, are now available on the GStreamer Conferences Archive site. Includes the GStreamer State of the Union talk by Tim-Philipp Müller, State of MPEG 2 Transport Stream (MPEG-TS) by Edward Hervey, and many others.

Creator of the popular free and open source video game library manager Playnite has a positive update on a Linux version, with plans for it during 2026.

Back in February, GamingOnLinux covered the latest update from the creator on their plans for it, where they noted "To sum this up, Linux version is definitely something I plan to work on in future, it's just going to happen later than originally planned.".

ClamAV, a widely adopted free and open-source antivirus software developed by Cisco Talos, will undergo a substantial cleanup of its signature databases in December, marking its largest reduction effort since the project began more than two decades ago.

Cisco Talos, which maintains ClamAV, has evaluated the full signature set and identified large numbers of entries that no longer match any activity in current threat data. These signatures will be retired beginning December 16, 2025, resulting in smaller databases and lower resource usage for users.

The change will have an immediate and measurable impact. The main.cvd file, currently around 163 MB, will shrink to roughly 80 MB. The daily.cvd file, which is 62 MB today, will fall to about 22 MB, so that users will see it is nearly half their current size.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/55402381

As Snowden told us, video and audio recording capabilities of your devices are NSA spying vectors. OSS/Linux is a safeguard against such capabilities. The massive datacenter investments in US will be used to classify us all into a patriotic (for Israel)/Oligarchist social credit score, and every mega tech company can increase profits through NSA cooperation, and are legally obligated to cooperate with all government orders.

Speech to text and speech automation are useful tech, though always listening state sponsored terrorists is a non-NSA targeted path for sweeping future social credit classifications of your past life.

Some small LLMs that can be used for speech to text: https://modal.com/blog/open-source-stt

It's the Blender 5.0 release day! Blender 5.0 is a big step forward for this open-source 3D modeling software with better Vulkan viewport support across different GPUs/drivers, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other very nice refinements for this popular cross-platform software package.

The Blender 5.0 release day is a bit of a mess due to the Cloudflare outage happening today. While much of the Cloudflare outage has since been addressed and services restored (including at Phoronix), Blender.org is still having HTTP 500 errors due to Cloudflare.