September GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali featuring Twelve new GNU releases: Octave, MDK, and more!

• coreutils-9.8: GNU Coreutils includes all of the basic command-line tools that are expected in a POSIX system. These provide the basic file, shell and text manipulation functions of the GNU system. Most of these tools offer extended functionality beyond that which is outlined in the POSIX standard.
• freeipmi-1.6.16: 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.
• gcal-4.2.0: Gcal is a program to calculate and print calendars on the command-line. Calendars can be printed in 1-month, 3-month or whole-year views. In addition, eternal holiday lists can be generated for many countries, which can be complemented by user-made lists of fixed dates to make an agenda. Gcal can also calculate astronomical data, such as the phases of the moon, and supports alternative calendar formats: Julian, Gregorian, Islamic, Chinese and more.
• gnunet-0.25.1: GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking. The high-level goal is to provide a strong foundation of free software for a global, distributed network that provides security and privacy. GNUnet in that sense aims to replace the current internet protocol stack. Along with an application for secure publication of files, it has grown to include all kinds of basic applications for the foundation of a GNU internet.
• gnupg-2.5.12: The GNU Privacy Guard is a complete implementation of the OpenPGP standard. It is used to encrypt and sign data and communication. It features powerful key management and the ability to access public key servers. It includes several libraries: libassuan (IPC between GnuPG components), libgpg-error (centralized GnuPG error values), and libskba (working with X.509 certificates and CMS data).
• libunistring-1.4: GNU libunistring is a library providing functions to manipulate Unicode strings and for manipulating C strings according to the Unicode standard.
• linux-libre-6.17-gnu: 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.
• mdk-1.3.1: GNU MDK is the Mix Development Kit, an emulation of the pedagogical computer MIX and its assembly language MIXAL. MIX has a virtual CPU with standard features such as registers, memory cells, an overflow toggle, comparison flags, input-output devices, and a set of binary instructions. The package includes a compiler, a virtual machine, a GUI for the virtual machine, and more.
• octave-10.3.0: 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-20250922: 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.
• shepherd-1.0.7: The GNU Shepherd is a daemon-managing daemon, meaning that it supervises the execution of system services, replacing similar functionality found in typical init systems. It provides dependency-handling through a convenient interface and is based on GNU Guile.
• unifont-17.0.01: 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.

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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.