Hello everyone!
It’s been a long time without an update here. I hope everyone has had a good holiday season so far and is alive and well! Here’s to 2025 treating you well. My new years resolution is always to not make a resolution at all, but I suppose that’s a bit antithetical 
Here’s some updates on everything Libranext and related. Be warned, it’s a bit of a wall of text!
State of the Libranext Linux Distribution
Well, there’s not a massive amount of news here. The last release was in July 2023. Ouch. There’s a lot of work involved in maintaining a distribution, and frankly, I haven’t had the time to dedicate to properly developing the distribution. My day job is primarily in agriculture, so during fall and spring I have little time to even spend at home. That being said, the project isn’t dead, just a bit of a (long) dormant period. I had a developer hired to help with some of the work, but that did not work out.
State of other projects
Under the same umbrella, I’ve got several other projects that have seen a lot of work in the past year. One of those projects is the Osiris toolkit, which is a fork of Qt 2.3.2. It’s aim is to provide a way to resurrect legacy Linux software that used either Qt1 or Qt2. Osiris runs on modern Linux, and is super lightweight and fast. It is GPLv2 licensed (as distributed). I’m inching up on the next release, which will be 2.4.2. It now supports C++11, and has been moved to the modern Meson build system. This in turn has uncovered a lot of little bugs that have been fixed along the way. Build times are drastically shorter now. This is most likely the last release in the 2.4.x series. Since Osiris is considered stable at this point, the plan now is to fully modernize it with Wayland support, since X is being (sadly) deprecated. That will occur in the 2.5.x series. For now, the 2.4.2 release will also have packages available for some distributions so it’ll be easy to install and test out.
Related to Osiris (and one of the driving factors) is MiDE. MiDE is a fork of KDE version 1. KDE1 uses Qt version 1, which has licensing issues. Qt2 is available as GPL and porting was not terrible timewise (approximately 80 hours). There’s still a few lingering bugs to fix that’s preventing a preview release, but it’s getting closer. Like Osiris, it’s fast, small, and very lightweight. Porting MiDE to Wayland will take a lot of work, but once Osiris is Wayland-ready, it’ll also migrate.
Yet another project, is openEarthCAD (formerly LGNSS). This relates more to my day job than Libranext. It’s a precision machine control suite. Both hardware and software is in-house. It allows automated control of machinery (such as dozers, excavators, etc.) for earthmoving operations. There’s no real open-source competitor to any of the big name brands (Topcon, Leica, Trimble, etc.). Still got a long ways to go, but there’s been some progress on the software side of things.
Supporting Libranext
Well, Linux distributions don’t pay the bills for most. And that’s not really why I’ve been doing Libranext. I enjoy doing it. But keeping servers online, hardware maintained, paying developers (when developers are hired), takes a fair amount of resources. As such, I’ve been purchasing servers and PCs by the pallet, refurbishing them, configuring them to customer requirements, and shipping them back out again. A large number of my customers are students and homelabbers, but I also recently shipped a large number out to a datacenter to go back into production use, and even going international as well. It’s also great to keep lots of perfectly usable electronics from going to the landfill and giving them another lease on life. Hopefully, this will help support Libranext and its projects.
This brings me to one of the last points. When I resurrected Libranext this round, I brought it under the auspices of a business entity (Alec Bloss Varied Industries, LLC dba Libranext Computer Systems), for various reasons. A small change is happening in that Libranext is being moved to my other business, Informed Technology Solutions, LLC, effective Jan 1, 2025. I’m doubling down on my involvement in the tech world, whether it be server and PC sales or software development. This doesn’t change anything about Libranext, other than a name change to the entity behind it. There are no shareholders, no corporate interests. I have no desire to turn it into Twitter or WordPress.
If you’ve made it through this wall of text, thanks for your continued support and following. Hopefully, I’ll have some more evident progress to show soon.