News

Hearing your device speak

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This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 06 Feb 2025, Week 6

Community News

From a prolific FOSS dev @woheller69 we now have another app, SherpaTTS, Text-to-Speech engine based on Next-gen Kaldi. We’ve complained before about the FOSS voice situation, that while RHVoice got some updates, it’s still limited to 8 natural voices, and the new eSpeak is great, supports many voices, but the robotic synthesized sounds are harder to tune and use. Out of the LLM gold rush we hope to extract some value for the end users too, and applying their magic here appears to give some really nice results.

How good? SeeHear for yourself on the test page.

After install and the download of your language of choice, don’t forget to go to Android Settings, System, Languages, Text-to-speech and select SherpaTTS as the preferred engine. Now your apps will use it to give you directions, like Organic Maps mentioned below and OsmAnd~, read text out-loud or even your notifications (via Voice Notify).

On related apps, from the same developer even, do also try Whisper (Voice recognition speech to text: you don’t type, you just talk and magically the text appears on screen) and Seamless (After talking, the text is translated to another language).

Organic Maps: Hike, Bike, Drive Offline, was updated to 2025.01.26-9-FDroid. In the past we had our share of long philosophical discussions with the OM app team, say about newly added ‘features’, and about the nature of Ads but it all ended well enough from our point of view. The latest version improves upon all these, map features aside, as it fixes two of the pain points that had the app flagged with anti-features more than one year ago. The added Kayak hotel links are now a setting users need to enable if they want and the CDN servers that serve your maps finally run FOSS software.

Tubular, A free lightweight YouTube front-end, is newly added. It’s a fork of NewPipe which brings support for SponsorBlock and ReturnYouTubeDislike features and more.

Newly Added Apps

8 more apps were newly added

Updated Apps

142 more apps were updated

(expand for the full list)

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LN Webworks: Top Drupal Agencies That Will Revolutionize Your Web Strategy

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LN Webworks: Top Drupal Agencies That Will Revolutionize Your Web Strategy

One of the most popular content management systems (CMSs) is Drupal.Over 2.4% of all websites are using it for web and mobile app development. But why is it so popular among many developers andDrupal development agencies?

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You should contact a Drupal agency that can help you improve your digital growth.

Why Should You Hire A Drupal Company?

You should opt for a Drupal agency to support your web development for many reasons. Understanding those elements in hiring a Drupal agency can help you improve your project’s success.

UnixWare in 2025: still actively developed and maintained

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It kind of goes by under the radar, but aside from HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, there’s another traditional classic UNIX still in active development today: UnixWare (and its sibling, OpenServer). Owned and developed by Xinuos, UnixWare and other related code and IP was acquired by them when the much-hated SCO crashed and burned about 15 years ago or so, and they’ve been maintaining it ever since. About a year ago, Xinuos released Update Pack 1 and Maintenance Pack 1 for UnixWare 7 Definitive 2018, followed by similar update packs for OpenServer 6 later in 2024. These update packs bring a bunch of bugfixes and performance improvements, as well as a slew of updated open source components, like new versions of SAMBA, sendmail, GCC and tons of other GNU components, OpenSSH and OpenSSL, and so, so much more, enabling a relatively modern and up-to-date build and porting environment. They can be installed through the patchck update utility, and while the Maintenance Pack is free for existing registered users, the Update Pack requires a separate license. UnixWare, while fully capable as a classic UNIX for workstations, isn’t really aimed at individuals or hobbyists (sadly), and instead focuses on existing enterprise deployments, where such licensing costs are par for the course. UnixWare runs on x86, and can be installed both on real hardware as well as in various virtualised environments. I contacted Xinuos a few days ago for a review license, and they supplied me with one so I can experiment with and write about UnixWare. I’ve currently got it installed in a Linux kvm, where it runs quite well, including the full X11R6 CDE desktop environment and graphical administration tools. Installing updates is a breeze thanks to patchck automating the process of finding, downloading, and installing the correct ones. I intend to ask Xinuos about an optimal configuration for running UnixWare on real hardware, too.