Round Up of Latest OS and Software Releases
An Anonymous Coward writes:
https://nethack.org/v500/release.html
VideoLAN Releases dav2d 0.0.1 as Early Preview AV2 DecoderNetHack 5.0 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack, which is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.6.
NetHack 5.0.0 is a release of NetHack. As a .0 version, there may be some bugs encountered. Constructive suggestions, GitHub pull requests, and bug reports are all welcome and encouraged.
Along with the game improvements and bug fixes, NetHack 5.0 strives to make some general architectural improvements to the game or to its building process. Among them, 5.0:
- Has its source code compliant with the C99 standard.
- Removes barriers to building NetHack on one platform and operating system, for later execution on another (possibly quite different) platform and/or operating system. That capability is generally known as "cross-compiling." See the file "Cross-compiling" in the top-level folder for more information on that.
- The build-time "yacc and lex"-based level compiler, the "yacc and lex"-based dungeon compiler, and the quest text file processing previously done by NetHack's "makedefs" utility, have been replaced with Lua text alternatives that are loaded and processed by the game during play.A list of over 3100 fixes and changes can be found in the game's sources in the file doc/fixes5-0-0.txt. The text in there was written for the development team's own use and is provided "as is". Some entries might be considered "spoilers", particularly in the "new features" section.
An Anonymous Coward writes:
FreeBSD 15.1 Beta Released For Early TestingVideoLAN, the organization behind VLC media player, has released dav2d 0.0.1 "Merbanan," the first public preview of its AV2 decoder and successor to the widely used dav1d AV1 decoder.
VideoLAN president and lead VLC developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf prepared the release, describing it as "a very early preview release of an AV2 decoder."
AV2 is the planned successor to AV1, the royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. Earlier this year, AOMedia released a draft AV2 specification for public review after several years of development. The codec remains in the standardization process, so dav2d is an early implementation rather than production-ready software.
The new decoder builds on the approach established by dav1d, VideoLAN's AV1 decoder developed with the FFmpeg community, which played a key role in AV1 adoption by offering a fast, cross-platform software decoder while hardware support was still expanding.
dav2d is intended to serve a similar role for AV2, though it remains in the early stages of development. The decoder is CPU-based, cross-platform, and built on dav1d, with ongoing work on the C implementation, API, platform support, and architecture-specific optimizations.
Last but not least, VideoLAN has not announced when dav2d will be integrated into a stable VLC release, but that certainly won't happen anytime soon. At the moment, it only lays the groundwork for future playback support in open-source multimedia software as the codec and ecosystem mature.
dav2d 0.0.1 is available through VideoLAN's official GitLab repository.
An Anonymous Coward writes:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-15.1-Beta-1
Following last year's release of FreeBSD 15.0, FreeBSD 15.1 is working its way toward release release in June. For kicking off the release dance, FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 1 is available today for testing.
FreeBSD 15.1 pulls in a number of driver updates, including for better hardware support and the various WiFi driver enhancements that have been pursued as of late along with working toward better power management. As of writing, the 15.1 release notes have yet to begin to be filled out for fully documenting the many changes being made for FreeBSD 15.1.
One of the changes I was excited to see with FreeBSD 15.1 was the new KDE Plasma desktop install option from within their existing CLI installer. This has been part of the effort to enhance the laptop/desktop experience for FreeBSD. Surprisingly though when firing up the FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 1 AMD64 install media this morning, the KDE Plasma desktop option was not presented in any of the installer interfaces.
So unfortunately that KDE Plasma desktop option seems to have not made it unless it's otherwise being restricted to certain detected hardware/software state or other limitations. In any event those wanting to try out the FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 1 release can find the download information via the mailing list announcement.
From here there are weekly betas expected until the end of May when the release candidate happens and then if all goes well FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE will be out on 2 June.
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