June GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali featuring eighteen new GNU releases: Linux-libre, Direvent, and more! — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software
June GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali featuring eighteen new GNU releases: Linux-libre, Direvent, and more!
Eighteen new GNU releases in the last month (as of June 30, 2026):
- apl-2.0: GNU APL is a free
interpreter for the programming language APL. It is an implementation of the ISO standard 13751.
- binutils-2.46.1: GNU
Binutils is a collection of tools for working with binary files. Perhaps the most notable are ld, a linker, and as, an assembler. Other tools include programs to display binary profiling information, list the strings in a binary file, and utilities for working with archives. The bfd library for working with executable and object formats is also included.
- direvent-5.5: A daemon
that monitors directories for events, such as creating, deleting or modifying files. It can monitor different sets of directories for different events. When an event is detected, direvent calls a specified external program with information about the event, such as the location within the file system where it occurred. Thus, direvent provides an easy way to react immediately if given files undergo changes, for example, to track changes in important system configuration files.
- freeipmi-1.6.18: GNU
FreeIPMI is a collection of in-band and out-of-band IPMI software in accordance with the IPMI v1.5/2.0 specification. These programs provide a set of interfaces for platform management. Common functionality includes sensor monitoring, system event monitoring, power control and serial-over-LAN.
- gcc-15.3.0: GCC is the GNU
Compiler Collection. It provides compiler front-ends for several languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, Ada, and Go. It also includes runtime support libraries for these languages.
- global-6.6.15: GNU GLOBAL is
a source code tagging system that functions in the same way across a wide array of environments, such as different text editors, shells and web browsers. The resulting tags are useful for quickly moving around in a large, deeply nested project.
GNUtrition is a free nutrition analysis software. With it, one can keep track of the nutritional information of food. The software uses the Nutrient Database of Standard Reference of the US Department of Agriculture as a source of food nutrient information.
- gsasl-2.2.4: GNU SASL is an
implementation of the Simple Authentication and Security Layer framework. On network servers such as IMAP or SMTP servers, SASL is used to handle client/server authentication. This package contains both a library and a command-line tool to access the library.
- less-704: GNU less is a pager,
a program that allows you to view large amounts of text in page-sized chunks. Unlike traditional pagers, it allows both backwards and forwards movement through the document. It also does not have to read the entire input file before starting, so it starts faster than most text editors.
- libextractor-1.16: GNU
libextractor is a library for extracting metadata from files. It supports a very large number of file formats, including audio files, document files, and archive files. Each file format is implemented as a plugin, so new formats can be added easily. The package also contains a command-line tool to extract metadata from a file and print the results.
- libidn-1.44: libidn is a
library implementing of the Stringprep, Punycode and IDNA specifications. These are used to encode and decode internationalized domain names. It includes native C, C# and Java libraries.
GNU Linux-Libre is a free (as in freedom) variant of the kernel Linux. It has been modified to remove all non-free binary blobs.
- nano-9.1: GNU nano is a small
and simple text editor for use in a terminal. Besides basic editing, it supports: undo/redo, syntax highlighting, spell checking, justifying, auto-indentation, bracket matching, interactive search-and-replace (with regular expressions), and the editing of multiple files.
- octave-11.3.0: GNU Octave is
a high-level interpreted language that is specialized for numerical computations. It can be used for both linear and non-linear applications and it provides great support for visualizing results. Work may be performed both at the interactive command-line as well as via script files.
- parallel-20260622: GNU
Parallel is a tool for executing shell jobs in parallel using one or more computers. Jobs can consist of single commands or of scripts and they are executed on lists of files, hosts, users or other items.
- r-4.6.1: R is a language and
environment for statistical computing and graphics. It provides a variety of statistical techniques, such as linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification and clustering. It also provides robust support for producing publication-quality data plots. A large amount of 3rd-party packages are available, greatly increasing its breadth and scope.
- tramp-2.8.2: TRAMP is a GNU
Emacs package that allows you to access files on remote machines as though they were local files. This includes editing files, performing version control tasks and modifying directory contents with dired. Access is performed via ssh, rsh, rlogin, telnet or other similar methods.
- unifont-17.0.05: GNU
Unifont is a bitmap font covering essentially all of Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane. The package also includes utilities to ease adding new glyphs to the font.
To download: nearly all GNU software is available most reliably from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/. Optionally, you may find faster download speeds at a mirror located geographically closer to you by choosing from the list of mirrors published at https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html, or you may use https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.
A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance. Please see https://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html.
If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.
As always, please feel free to write to me, bandali@gnu.org, with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.