iFixit is ending its collaboration with Samsung, as iFixit claims the Korean giant is not actually interested in offering repair options at all. As we tried to build this ecosystem we consistently faced obstacles that made us doubt Samsung’s commitment to making repair more accessible. We couldn’t get parts to local repair shops at prices and quantities that made business sense. The part prices were so costly that many consumers opted to replace ... ⌘ Read more
iFixit is ending its collaboration with Samsung, as iFixit claims the Korean giant is not actually interested in offering repair options at all. As we tried to build this ecosystem we consistently faced obstacles that made us doubt Samsung’s commitment to making repair more accessible. We couldn’t get parts to local repair shops at prices and quantities that made business sense. The part prices were so costly that many consumers opted to replace ... ⌘ Read more
I needed a bit of a break from “real work” recently, so I started a new programming project that was low-stakes and purely recreational. On April 21st, I set out to see how much of a Unix-like operating system for x86\\_64 targets that I could put together in about a month. The result is Bunnix. Not including days I didn’t work on Bunnix for one reason or another, I spent 27 days on this project. ↫ Drew DeVault Bunnix’ creator, Drew DeVault, has quite a bit ... ⌘ Read more_
It turns out way fewer people knew search engines like DuckDuckGo are just whitelabel versions of Microsoft Bing than I thought. Today, in most of Europe and Asia, search engines like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, other alternative search engines, ChatGPT internet search, and even Windows Copilot were all down. It turns out the ... ⌘ Read more
In which I build WindEmu, an emulator for the Psion Series 5mx (a PDA from 1999 running EPOC – the OS that would become Symbian), over the course of just over a week, without access to the actual hardware. Yet another cursed project. ↫ Ash Wolf I had never seen this before, even though it’s from 2019. You can load the emulator in your browser and use EPOC32 as if it’s running on the real thing, and I have to say it feel remarkably realistic for a project completed i ... ⌘ Read more
Google’s new search feature, AI Overviews, seems to be going awry. The tool, which gives AI-generated summaries of search results, appeared to instruct a user to put glue on pizza when they searched “cheese not sticking to pizza.” ↫ Jyoti Mann at Business Insider Google’s “artificial intelligence” is literally just parroting a joke Reddit comment from 11 years ago by a person named fucksmith. Google is paying Reddit 60 million dollar ... ⌘ Read more
Linux auto tiling manager with hot corner support for Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, Xfwm, KWin, Marco, Muffin, Mutter and other EWMH compliant window managers using the X11 window system. Therefore, this project provides dynamic tiling for XFCE, LXDE, LXQt, KDE and GNOME (Mate, Deepin, Cinnamon, Budgie) based desktop environments. Simply keep your current window manager ... ⌘ Read more
About a month ago we talked about the rumours, but now the feature’s officially announced: Microsoft is going to keep track of everything you do on your Windows machine by taking a constant stream of screenshots, and then making said screenshots searchable by using things like text and image recognition. As you might expect, this is a privacy nightmare, and the details and fine print accompanying this n ... ⌘ Read more
Several Dell products use ThinOS 9, such as the OptiPlex 3000 Thin Client, the OptiPlex All-In-One, and the Latitude series laptops, such as the Latitude 3440 and 5440. ThinOS is a ready-to-deploy solution that aims to improve virtual desktops while offering a secure platform for applications and services. It provides users with a seamless and integrated experience, whether remotely or from the ... ⌘ Read more
At the heart of developer productivity lies improving performance for developer workloads on Windows. Last year at Build, we announced Dev Drive a new storage volume tailor-made for developers and supercharged for performance and security. Since then, we have continued to invest further in Windows performance improvements for developer workloads. With the release of Windows 11 24H2, workflows will get even faster when developing o ... ⌘ Read more
Last week, Google unveiled a new little feature in Google Search, called “Web”. Residing alongside the various other options like “All”, “Images”, “Video”, and so on, its goal is to effectively strip Google Search results from everything we generally don’t like, and just present a list of actual links to actual websites. It turns out it’s quite simple to set this as your default search “engine” in your bro ... ⌘ Read more
noTunes is a macOS application that will prevent iTunes or Apple Music from launching. Simply launch the noTunes app and iTunes/Music will no longer be able to launch. For example, when bluetooth headphones reconnect. You can toggle the apps functionality via the menu bar icon with a simple left click. ↫ noTunes GitHub page Apparently, this is such a common complaint that an appli ... ⌘ Read more
Lawyers for Scarlett Johansson are demanding that OpenAI disclose how it developed an AI personal assistant voice that the actress says sounds uncannily similar to her own. Johansson’s legal team has sent OpenAI two letters asking the company to detail the process by which it developed a voice the tech company dubbed “Sky,” Johansson’s publicist told NPR in a revelation that has not been pr ... ⌘ Read more
Last week I wrote about Intel aiming to remove Xeon Phi support in GCC 15 with the products being end-of-life and deprecated in GCC 14. While some openly wondered whether the open-source community would allow it given the Xeon Phi accelerators were available to buy just a few years ago and at some very low prices going back years so some potentially finding use still out of them especially during this AI boom (and still readily available to buy ... ⌘ Read more
AntennaPod has been around for a long time – the first bit of code was published in 2011. Since then, the app has grown massively and had several main developers. The beauty of open-source is that so many people can contribute and make a great app together. But sometimes having many people work on a project can lead to different ways of thinking about how to structure the project. Because of this, AntennaPod gradually grew to have a number of weird ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft’s developer conference Build is taking place this week, so there’s been some major Windows news and announcements, and for once – we’re not talking about more ads in your operating system, or even “AI” shoehorned into, I don’t know, Phone Dialer or Windows Fax and Scan. First and foremost, Windows is going to get a new compiler, kernel, and schedu ... ⌘ Read more
Last year marked a significant milestone for both myself and the OpenBSD desktop community, as we successfully ported KDE Plasma 5 and all dependencies to OpenBSD. With the release of OpenBSD 7.5 on April 5, 2024, KDE Plasma in version 5.27.10 has become a part of our lovely operating system. This success is the result of years of development work and commitment to achieving this goal. KDE launched version 6 of its Plasma desktop environment on February 28, 2024, bringing ... ⌘ Read more
Windows Server 2025 comes equipped with dtrace as a native tool. DTrace is a command-line utility that enables users to monitor and troubleshoot their system’s performance in real-time. DTrace allows users to dynamically instrument both the kernel and user-space code without any need to modify the code itself. This versatile tool supports a range of data collection and analysis techniques, such as aggregations, histograms, and tra ... ⌘ Read more
iOS 17.5 seems to be experiencing a rather nasty bug that raises some very, very concerning questions about what Apple thinks “delete” really means. After updating their iPhone, one user said they were shocked to find old NSFW photos that they deleted in 2021 suddenly showing up in photos marked as recently uploaded to iCloud. Other users have also chimed in with similar stories. “Same here,” said one R ... ⌘ Read more
So, I won’t be wasting too many words on this – partially because I’m not into cheap soap operas, and partially because there’s no way to know what’s going on with this nonsense without dedicating a year’s worth of detailed study into the subject. So it seems that the company Hyperion, which develops and owns the rights to Amiga OS 4 and Amiga OS 3.2 has gone into bankruptcy proceeding ... ⌘ Read more
I didn’t know this was a thing, but apparently Microsoft offers a Windows tune-up application in the vein of things like CCleaner and similar tools. One of the things it does is protect users from applications that try and change default settings, and it seems the application takes this matter very seriously. Microsoft may be taking a bit of liberty w ... ⌘ Read more
Apple’s grudging accommodation of European law – allowing third-party browser engines on its mobile devices – apparently comes with a restriction that makes it difficult to develop and support third-party browser engines for the region. The Register has learned from those involved in the browser trade that Apple has limited the development and testing of third-party browser engines to devices physically loc ... ⌘ Read more
After launching Slack AI in February, Slack appears to be digging its heels in, defending its vague policy that by default sucks up customers’ data—including messages, content, and files—to train Slack’s global AI models. ↫ Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica I’ve never used Slack and don’t intend to ever start, but the outcry about this reached far beyond Slack and its own communities. It’s been all over v ... ⌘ Read more
It’s a compelling story and on the surface makes a lot of sense. Carefully curated software patches applied to a known Linux kernel, frozen at a specific release, would obviously seem to be preferable to the random walk of an upstream open source Linux project. But is it true? Is there data to support this ? After a lot of hard work and data analysis by my CIQ kernel engineering c ... ⌘ Read more
It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve begun to dig deep into the inner workings of how terminal emulators, and the applications that run inside of them, really work. I’ve learned that there is a lot of innovation and creative problem solving happening in this space, even though the underlying technology is over half a century old. I’ve also found that many people who use terminal based tools (including shells like Bash and editors like Vim) know very little about terminals ... ⌘ Read more
Nearly 30 years after the launch of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about how, exactly, Nintendo came to be interested in developing what would ultimately become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as a future for video games and looking for technological solutions that made business sense? Or was the Virtual Boy primarily the result of Nintendo ... ⌘ Read more
Winamp has announced that on 24 September 2024, the application’s source code will be open to developers worldwide. Winamp will open up its code for the player used on Windows, enabling the entire community to participate in its development. This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve. ↫ Winamp press release Nice, I guess, but twenty years to late ... ⌘ Read more
Ordinary modifiers are normally straightforward, in that they are additional keys that are held down as you type the main key. Control, Shift, and Alt all work this way (by default). However, some modifiers are ‘sticky’, where you tap their key once to turn them on and then tap their key again to turn them off. The obvious example of this is Caps Lock (unless you turn its effects off, remapping its physical key to be, say, another Ctrl key). ... ⌘ Read more
With Qualcomm and Microsoft about to flood the market with devices using the new Snapdragon X Elite, those of us who don’t want to use Windows felt a bit uneasy – what’s Linux support going to look like for this new generation of ARM devices? Well, it seems Qualcomm’s been busy, and they’ve published a blog post detailing their work on Linux support for the X Elite. It’s be ... ⌘ Read more
Google released Android 15 beta 2 today, and with it, they unveiled some more of the new features coming to Android later this year when the final release lands. Android 15 comes with something called a private space, an area with an extra layer of authentication where you can keep applications and data hidden away, such as banking applications or health data. It’s effectively a separate user profile, and shows up as a separate area in the application drawer when unlocked. When ... ⌘ Read more
As expected earlier this year, Raspberry Pi is going public on the stock exchange in London. Back then, CEO Eben Upton said he did not expect the IPO to change how Raspberry Pi did things, but history tells us that initial public offerings tend to, well, change how companies do things. In their official announcement that they intend to hold an IPO, there’s an incredibly interesting and telling contradiction, as noted by @yassie\\_j on Ma ... ⌘ Read more_
The NetBSD project seems to agree with me that code generated by “AI” like Copilot is tainted, and cannot be used safely. The project’s added a new guideline banning the use of code generated by such tools from being added to NetBSD unless explicitly permitted by “core“, NetBSD’s equivalent, roughly, of “technical management”. Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGP ... ⌘ Read more
I’m pretty sure most of you are familiar with KDE Neon, the distribution KDE maintains to provide easy access to the latest KDE technologies. However, did you know GNOME has something similar, called GNOME OS? It’s been around for a while, but has a far lower profile than KDE Neon does, and it seems they want to change that and put more of a spotlight on GNOME OS. GNOME OS is an immutable distribution using OSTree, the sam ... ⌘ Read more
This is not a joke: Google will now let you perform a “web” search. It’s rolling out “web” searches now, and in my early tests on desktop, it’s looking like it could be an incredibly popular change to Google’s search engine. The optional setting filters out almost all the other blocks of content that Google crams into a search results page, leaving you with links and text — and Google confirms to The Verge that it will b ... ⌘ Read more
A crucial but often entirely transparent feature of a modern package management system like Debian’s APT is its solver – basically the set of rules and instruction on how to handle dependencies when installing a package. APT is currently in the process of radically changing its solver, the first bits of which can be found in APT 2.9.3, referred to as solver3. Many of the changes and improvements get a little into the weeds and will mostly be transparent to users, but there is one featu ... ⌘ Read more
Google I/O, the company’s developer conference, started today, but for the first time since I can remember, Android and Chrome OS have been relegated to day two of the conference. The first day was all about “AI”, most of which I’m not even remotely interested in, except of course where it related to Google’s operating system offerings. And the company did have a few things to say about “AI” on Android, and the gener ... ⌘ Read more
After Broadcom acquired VMware, there’s been a steady stream of worrying or outright bad news for people using VMware products at home, for personal use, as enthusiasts. The biggest blow to the enthusiast market was the end of perpetual licensing, forcing people into subscriptions instead. Finally, though it seems we’re getting some good news. The most exciting part is that Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro wi ... ⌘ Read more
Now that Android – since version 13 – ships with the Android Virtualisation Framework, Google can start doing interesting things with it. It turns out the first interesting thing Google wants do with it is run Chrome OS inside of it. Even though AVF was initially designed around running small workloads in a highly stripped-down build of Android loaded in an isolated virtual machine, there’s technically no reason it c ... ⌘ Read more
As Nintendo Switch unlocks and homebrew software develops, people are inclined to explore the possibilities and whether or not they actually provide a good experience. Our new prime example seems to be a full install of Windows 11 Arm on the Switch. As noted by @PatRyk on Twitter, who actually set this up, the experience is pretty grueling! The initial installation took three hours, and even basic system tasks were unresponsive. ↫ Chris ... ⌘ Read more
Electronic Arts has a long, storied history of trying to wring more money out of gamers after they’ve purchased a game — now, it appears, the company’s hard at work on its next generation of in-game ads. EA CEO Andrew Wilson admitted as much on the company’s Q4 earnings call: when an analyst asked about “the market opportunity for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games,” he said the company’s already working on it. “W ... ⌘ Read more
Snikket is a FOSS project for creating private chat spaces for small groups, such as families, friends, or clubs. It doesn’t depend on a phone number, doesn’t upload address books anywhere, and doesn’t sell data to advertisers. It supports all the features you expect, including media and voice messages, audio and video calls, end-to-end encryption, group messaging, and more. Use it from multiple devices at once with the official apps, or even with unoff ... ⌘ Read more
Each S1012 node has a single Power10 processor, which can have 1, 4, or 8 cores activated, which suggests that it is the same single chip module (SCM) implementation of the Power10 processor that was used in the Power S1022s entry machine. The Power S1012 node has four ISDIMM memory slots (using the differential signaling created by Big Blue for its Power10 memory) with a maximum capacity of 256 GB. The node has four half-height ... ⌘ Read more
Apple has released the latest updates for virtually all of its actively supported devices today. Most include a couple handfuls of security updates, some new features for Apple News+ subscribers, and something called Cross-Platform Tracking Protection for Bluetooth devices. The iOS 17.5, iPadOS 17.5, macOS 4.5, watchOS 10.5, tvOS 17.5, and HomePod Software 17.5 ... ⌘ Read more
MacRelix is a Unix-like environment that runs in classic Mac OS. MacRelix natively supports classic 68K and PPC Mac OS, as well as Mac OS X on PPC via Carbon. ↫ MacRelix website The creator of MacRelix, Josh Juran, published an article in 2019 detailing the origins of the project. As a Mac OS developer, he was so unhappy with both CodeWarrior and Apple’s Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop (MPW), that he set out t ... ⌘ Read more
This article is a partial-rebuttal/partial-confirmation to KGOnTech’s Apple Vision Pro’s Optics Blurrier & Lower Contrast than Meta Quest 3, prompted by RoadToVR’s Quest 3 Has Higher Effective Resolution, So Why Does Everyone Think Vision Pro Looks Best? which cites KGOnTech. I suppose it’s a bit late, but it’s taken me a while to really get a good intuition for how visionOS renders fram ... ⌘ Read more
Window management in Emacs gets a bad rap. Some of this is deserved, but mostly this is a consequence of combining a very flexible and granular layout system with rather coarse controls. This leaves the door open to creating and using tools for handling windows that employ and provide better metaphors and affordances. As someone who’s spent an unnecessary amount of time trying different approaches to window management in Emacs over the decades, I decided to su ... ⌘ Read more
Disassembly and enhancements for Apple II DeskTop (a.k.a. Mouse Desk), a “Finder”-like GUI application for 8-bit Apples and clones with 128k of memory, utilizing double hi-res monochrome graphics (560×192), an optional mouse, and the ProDOS 8 operating system. ↫ Apple II DeskTop GitHub page The goal of this project is to reverse-engineer Apple II DeskTop, and fix bugs and enhance it in the process. I didn’t actually know tha ... ⌘ Read more
If you remember a time when using floppy disks didn’t seem weird, you’re probably at least 30 years old. Floppy disks or diskettes emerged around 1970 and, for a good three decades or so, they were the main way many people stored and backed up their computer data. All the software and programmes they bought came loaded onto clusters of these disks. They are a technology from a different era of computing, ... ⌘ Read more
Starting in the release 560 series, it will be recommended to use the open flavor of NVIDIA Linux Kernel Modules 119 wherever possible (Turing or later GPUs, or Ada or later when using GPU virtualization). ↫ NVIDIA developer forums Slowly but surely, NVIDIA is taking a more favourable position towards open source. It still feels surreal. ⌘ Read more
So I got accepted into GSoC again! I’m going to be working on WebKit2. But what is WebKit2, or even WebKit, for that matter? Well, WebPositive uses WebKit to render its web pages. Currently, we use the WebKitLegacy API to communicate with WebKit. It would be nice to switch to the newer version: WebKit2. However, our port of WebKit2 still needs work. At present, it has lost its ability to even render any webpage at all! So, getting WebKit2 to work will be the ... ⌘ Read more
As its first alpha release is closing in, we have another monthly update about COSMIC, System76’s new Linux desktop environment written in Rust. This month, they’ve further polished and shored up their application store, imaginatively named COSMIC App Store, and it’s supposedly incredibly fast – something I can’t say for its GNOME and KDE counterparts, which tend to be so slow I’ve always just default ... ⌘ Read more
X Server is slowly being deprecated in the Linux world and being replaced Wayland. Still X11 is an interesting protocol to look at from the perspective of binary communication and management of resource which require fast speeds. In this post I tried to cover basic information and create a simple but working app that is simple, defined in single file and easily compiles. No external code except l ... ⌘ Read more
We’ve been on the lookout for the arrival of the ChromeOS App Mall for a few months now. First discovered back in March, the new App Mall is arriving to do one, simple task: put the apps users want in one place to be found a Chromebook. While we have access to web apps, PWAs, Android apps and Linux apps on Chromebooks, it’s not always clear how to go about finding them. Should you install the web version or the Play Stor ... ⌘ Read more
Yuxuan Shui, the developer behind the X11 compositor picom (a fork of Compton) published a blog post detailing their experiences with using GitHub Copilot for a year. I had free access to GitHub Copilot for about a year, I used it, got used to it, and slowly started to take it for granted, until one day it was taken away. I had to re-adapt to a life without Copilot, but it also gave me a chance to look back at how I used Copilot, ... ⌘ Read more
Today we’re pleased to announce the beta release of Raspberry Pi Connect: a secure and easy-to-use way to access your Raspberry Pi remotely, from anywhere on the planet, using just a web browser. It’s often extremely useful to be able to access your Raspberry Pi’s desktop remotely. There are a number of technologies which can be used to do this, including VNC, and of course the X protocol itself. But they can be hard to configure, part ... ⌘ Read more
The U.S. has revoked licenses that allowed companies including Intel and Qualcomm to ship chips used for laptops and handsets to sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei Technologies, three people familiar with the matter said. ↫ Alexandra Alper, Fanny Potkin, David Shepardson The timing of this news is very interesting, as despite the massive sanctions the Un ... ⌘ Read more
NetBSD 10 and NetBSD 9.4 were only recently released, leaving one final branch to receive what will be its last update: NetBSD 8.3. NetBSD 8.0 was originally released in 2018, so this final release marks six years of updates, which is a good track record, especially now that two newer main releases are available to choose from. With 8.3 being the final release, this means no more regular or security updates, pkgsrc no longer su ... ⌘ Read more
This is the story on how I spent far too much money and time getting a scanner to work over iSCSI so that I could prove “Chris O” wrong on StackExchange. The TL;DR is that yes scanners work fine over iSCSI. ↫ xssfox The next step is connecting a bunch of flatbed scanners to a disk array enclosure, but that turns out to be quite an expensive little exercise. Regardless, this is absolutely wild, and I love it when people go to great lengths just to prove that something p ... ⌘ Read more
Jolie crystallises the programming concepts of service-oriented computing as linguistic constructs. The basic building blocks of software are not objects or functions, but rather services that can be relocated and replicated as needed. A composition of services is a service. ↫ Jolie website Jolie is open source and available on GitHub. ⌘ Read more
But today we got our hands on LPCAMM2 for the first time, and this looks like the future to us. LPCAMM2 is a totally modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops, using the latest LPDDR chips for maximum speed and efficiency. So instead of overpaying (or under-speccing) based on guesswork about your future memory needs, you’ll hopefully be able to buy your next laptop and then install more RAM as needed. Imagine that! ↫ Carsten Frauenheim LPDDR memory, u ... ⌘ Read more
GCC 14.1 has been released, and it should come as no surprise that the new features are not exactly something I, someone who doesn’t program, can properly parse. So, here’s the three items GCC itself thought were important to list first. The C frontend when targeting standards newer than C89 now considers many non-standard constructs as errors that were previously only warnings. See https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-14/porting\\_to.html#warnings-as-errors for more details. C23 \\_BitInt Bit-precise integer ... ⌘ Read more_
We’re all aware of Stack Overflow – it’s a place where programmers and regular users can ask technical questions, and get answers from anyone who thinks they know the answer. Stack Overflow has become so ubiquitous among programmers and developers, the concept of “I just copied the code off Stack Overflow” has become a consistent meme to indicate you don’t fully grasp how something work ... ⌘ Read more
I want to run GoToSocial on some \\*BSD system. Because I am who I am, I went for using NetBSD 10.0 . And because my hypervisor is running bhyve on OmniOS , you get the title of this blog post. Don’t get too anxious, it is quite straightforward. So let the journey begin. ↫ Joel Carnat Bhyve is a hypervisor originating from FreeBSD, while OmniOS is a distribution of illumos, a continuation of the last open source Solaris release from Oracle. GoToSocial, meanwh ... ⌘ Read more*
The grabber in Windows 3.1 was improved to save and restore the index register as well, but it does not attempt to restore the flip-flop state, which is significant. The problem with the VGA emulation was that it erroneously applied the flip-flop state to reads from port 3C0h, and Windows 3.1 would save the wrong index register value… but only the second time through, because the flip-flop state was different at that point. That is to say, the Windows 3.1 ... ⌘ Read more
In addition to Linux 6.10 expected to drop support for very old DEC Alpha processors (EV5 and earlier), it looks like the PowerPC 40x (early PowerPC 400 series) processor and platform support will be retired too. Back in 2020 was a proposal for dropping PowerPC 40x support from the Linux kernel given that the code was orphaned for a long time with no apparent users. The PowerPC 40x processors were fou ... ⌘ Read more
Windows 11 supports a variety of ARM processors from Qualcomm. According to the official documentation, you need a computer with the Snapdragon 850 processor inside or newer to run the current operating system officially. However, customers with PCs powered by the Snapdragon 835, the original Windows on ARM chip from 2016, can bypass hardware requirements and install Windows 11 at ... ⌘ Read more
Snikket is a FOSS project for creating private chat spaces for small groups, such as families, friends, or clubs. It doesn’t depend on a phone number, doesn’t upload address books anywhere, and doesn’t sell data to advertisers. It supports all the features you expect, including media and voice messages, audio and video calls, end-to-end encryption, group messaging, and more. Use it from multiple devices at once with the official apps, or even with unofficial, third-party apps ... ⌘ Read more
That’s right: it’s PowerPC, the most unloved of the architectures CE ever ran on — in fact, this is the first PowerPC Windows CE device I’ve ever found, and I’m the self-described biggest pro-PowerPC bigot in the world. Here’s an unusual form factor Windows CE device, running on the operating system’s least used CPU, from a storied computer company near t ... ⌘ Read more
Still rocking your Palm OS device, but mutter under your breath every time you need to log into a website or service with two-factor authentication? Sick of carrying around an Android or iOS device just so you can log in on your Palm PDA? Worry no more, your prayers have been answered, you can finally throw that Android or iOS garbage into the sun. Get your 2-factor codes on your Palm, just like Google Authenticator. Unlike Hotpants (an old port of a J2ME phone app), ... ⌘ Read more
We’d like to thank this past week’s sponsor JMP for sponsoring OSNews. As a reminder, JMP is a fully FOSS service providing a way to get a real phone number that operates over the internet using XMPP. They provide numbers in the USA and Canada with everything you need to access SMS/MMS/etc. and voice calls using your XMPP (or SIP) clients of choice across all your devices. They are committed to growing the use of open communications technology such as XMPP, ult ... ⌘ Read more
But the biggest differential factor between BSDs and GNU/Linux is the way it is structured. In Linux, all components are designed to work together, but are completely separate. You’ve got the kernel, init systems, multimedia daemons, userland, bootloader, virtualization and containerization mechanisms, package managers, and so on. They are all separate projects with their own goals and are operated by separate entities. This is why we’ve got different Linux Distributions instead of O ... ⌘ Read more
Game of Trees (Got) is a version control system which prioritizes ease of use and simplicity over flexibility. Got is still under development; it is being developed on OpenBSD and its main target audience are OpenBSD developers. Got uses Git repositories to store versioned data. Git can be used for any functionality which has not yet been implemented in Got. It will always remain possible to work with both Got and Git on the same repository. ↫ Game o ... ⌘ Read more
The big question – does all this have a future? The good news is that all new hardware has generic support in X. Someone writes either a modesetting kernel driver or a classical wsdisplay kernel driver and they will be automatically supported by the associated drivers in X. The bad news is that to have applications running we require access to a larger open source ecosystem, and that ecosystem has a lot of churn and is easily distracted by shiny new squirrels ... ⌘ Read more
Do any of you remember the browser Dillo? The project’s been through a rough few years after the main developer of the layout engine sadly passed away, the lead developer disappeared from the project, the dillo.org domain was lost and taken over by spammers – but now there’s new people at the helm, and the browser just released it first new version since 2015. Dillo 3.1.0 brings a whole host of new features and improvements. Dillo is open ... ⌘ Read more
To support Zero Trust deployments trying to lock down devices to only access approved network destinations, we are announcing the development of Zero Trust DNS (ZTDNS) in a future version of Windows. ZTDNS was designed to be interoperable by using network protocols from open standards to satisfy Zero Trust requirements such as those found in OMB M-22-09 and NIST SP 800-207. ZTDNS will be helpful to any administrator trying to use ... ⌘ Read more
The notice was filed on developer platform GitHub, which Nintendo claimed housed repositories that “offer and provide access to the Yuzu emulator or code based on ” which “illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Switch games.” GitHub said it contacted the owners of the repositories to provide an “opportunity to make ... ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD is working on a graphical installer. Finally. The first hurdle to overcome when testing a new Operating System is to get it installed. What is more, the first impression new users gather from an Operating System is its installation process. The state of the art for Operating System installers nowadays definitely involves a graphical process. This is the case for mainstream systems but also for other UNIX systems comparable to FreeBSD: RedHa ... ⌘ Read more
COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE) is a new project by System76, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Pop!\\_OS. In this tutorial, we will give you an overview about COSMIC DE and its features, and then we will walk you through the steps to install COSMIC Desktop Environment in the latest Fedora 40 Linux system. ↫ Senthilkumar Palani at OSTechNix A very easy way to try out the current pre-alpha state of CO ... ⌘ Read more_
Microsoft is making security its number one priority for every employee, following years of security issues and mounting criticisms. After a scathing report from the US Cyber Safety Review Board recently concluded that “Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul,” it’s doing just that by outlining a set of security principles and goals that are tied ... ⌘ Read more
This is, in a way, a mature OS with an ecosystem and an aftermarket. (Which, we feel we must explicitly spell out, means that quite a few of those third-party applications and drivers will cost you money.) There are emulators that will let you run 20th century Acorn apps that you can find online, but this isn’t an emulated vintage environment like Amiga Forever. It’s not meant for running games from thirty years ago. ... ⌘ Read more
Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college’s General Electric GE-225 mainframe. Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing a ... ⌘ Read more
Qualcomm’s Adreno 6xx architecture has been superseded Adreno 7xx, but it’s still used in countless devices, including the current-gen Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. Here, I’ll be looking at the Adreno 640 GPU in the Snapdragon 855. Zarif98 on Reddit kindly provided a OnePlus 7 Pro, and I’ll be using that to check out Adreno 640. Compared to the older Snapdragon 821’s Adreno 530, Adreno 640 dramatically increases compute throughput while still working within a very constraine ... ⌘ Read more
Years of accumulated security debt at Microsoft are seemingly crashing down upon the company in a manner that many critics warned about, but few ever believed would actually come to light. Microsoft is an entrenched enterprise provider, owning nearly one-quarter of the global cloud infrastructure services market and, as of Q1 last year, nearly 20% of the worldwide SaaS application market, according to Synergy Research Gr ... ⌘ Read more
With 14.9, Vanguard, Riot’s proprietary Anti-Cheat system will be deployed and active in League of Legends. This means that active enforcement of Vanguard will be in effect and working hard to make sure your queues are free from scripters, botters, and cheaters! We recently released a blog detailing the “why” behind bringing Vang ... ⌘ Read more
Anyone who has spent any time recently using non-GNOME GTK desktop environments, like Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce, has had to deal with the unfortunate reality of a lot of GTK applications becoming GNOME applications instead, using GNOME’s own libadwaita. These applications are hard to theme, and do not integrate at all with the proper GTK applicati ... ⌘ Read more
Another month, another detailed report about the progress made in Redox, the Rust-based operating system. A major improvements this month is support for USB HID, allowing USB keyboards and mice to work on Redox, but the project does note USB hubs are still problematic and might not work properly. Thanks to these USB improvements, Redox’ desktop environment Orbital now also ran on ARM64 in Qemu for the first time, which is a great step towards running it on real ARM64 hardware. ... ⌘ Read more
Humans speak countless different languages. Not only are these languages incompatible, but runtime transpilation is a real pain. Sadly, every standardisation initiative has failed. At least there is someone to blame for this state-of-affairs: God. It was him, after-all, who cursed humanity to speak different languages, in an early dispute over a controversial property development. However, mankind can only blame itself for the fact that computers struggle to talk to each other ... ⌘ Read more
Over 35 years ago, these problems with software portability led to the emergence of the first POSIX standard in 1988. The acronym was coined by Richard Stallman, who added “X” to the end of Portable Operating System Interface. It’s meant to provide a specification of the interface that different Unix operating systems should have in common, including programming languages and tools. It’s important to note that the interface is portable, and not the implementation. ↫ vorakl While POSI ... ⌘ Read more
Although Google has shown significant progress in recent weeks in improving RISC-V support in Android, it seems that we’re still quite a bit away from seeing RISC-V hardware running certified builds of Android. Earlier today, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google who, according to their LinkedIn, leads the Android Systems Team and works on Android’s Linux kernel fork, submitted a series of patches to AOSP that “remove ACK’s suppo ... ⌘ Read more
JMP is a fully FOSS service providing a way to get a real phone number that operates over the internet using XMPP. They provide numbers in the USA and Canada with everything you need to access SMS/MMS/etc. and voice calls using your XMPP (or SIP) clients of choice across all your devices. They are committed to growing the use of open communications technology such as XMPP, ultimately working to help people move their communication off the unencrypted telephone network and onto the fe ... ⌘ Read more
There’s a new 9front release! So, what exactly is 9front, you may ask? Well, after it became clear that Bell Labs wasn’t doing much with plan9, a group of developers took matters into their own hands and created 9front, a fork of plan9. Their latest release is called DO NOT INSTALL, and brings things like more USB audio support, DNS over TLS, WiFi support for the Raspberry Pi, I2C support, and much more. I’m not particularly well-versed in the world of plan9, and more ... ⌘ Read more
Lennart Poettering, main developer of systemd, has announced run0, a systemd-based replacement for the well-known sudo command that fixes many of he inherent issues with the widely used tool to gain temporary elevated privileges. There are various problems with sudo, which basically come down to that it’s a large SUID binary, meaning it consists of privileged code that unprivileged users can run from their own context. This ... ⌘ Read more
Well, this was a wild goose chase of a read. J. B. Crawford dove into the history of something I’ve never heard of – Microsoft At Work – and came away with a story that’ while clearer thanks to his research, is still frustratingly nebulous. I’m still not entirely sure what Microsoft At Work really was, but I think it had the goal of running Windows on communications devices like faxes, to make it easier to share and work on documents across various devices. Crawford did a lot of digging, and eve ... ⌘ Read more
This is a virtual DEC PDP-1 (emulated in HTML5/JavaScript) running the original code of “Spacewar!”, the earliest known digital video game. If available, use gamepads or joysticks for authentic gameplay — the game was originally played using custom “control boxes”. Spacewar! was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen ... ⌘ Read more
Back when I was working on my article about PA-RISC, HP-UX, and UNIX workstations in general, I made extensive use of OpenPA, Paul Weissmann’s invaluable and incredibly detailed resource about HP’s workstation efforts, HP-UX, and tons of related projects and products. Weissmann’s been doing some serious digging, and has unearthed details about a number of essentially forgotten operating system efforts. First, it tur ... ⌘ Read more
As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss – ie spending more than we’ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual incom ... ⌘ Read more
In February last year I wrote about running a FreeBSD desktop, and concluded that sometimes you need to give yourself permission to tinker. Well recently I’ve started tinkering with Alpine Linux! It’s been recommended to me for years, so I’m finally getting around to checking it out. There’s a lot to like if you come from BSD, which we’ll dig into here. ↫ Ruben Schade Just a quick look at this unexpectedly popular Linux distribution that really has its own identity. ⌘ Read more
The Genode project has released Sculpt OS 24.04, the general purpose desktop operating system based on the Genode OS Framework. This release is absolutely jam-packed with new features, improvements, and changes, and it’s hard to know where to begin. One of the biggest new features is support for suspend/resume, an experimental feature for now, for wh ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is about to go even more hog-wild with “AI” in Windows, as it intends to start recording everything you do on your Windows computer so “AI” features can find stuff for you. According to my sources, AI Explorer will run in the background and capture everything you do on your computer. It will document and triage everything it sees, no matter what apps or interfaces you’re ... ⌘ Read more
Regarding the release of the MS-DOS 4.00 source code, Michal Necasek makes an excellent point about how just dumping the code in git is a terrible and destructive way to release older source code. It’s terrific that the source code for DOS 4.00/4.01 was released! But don’t expect to build the source code mutilated by git without problems. Historic source code should be released simply as an archive of files, ZIP or tar or 7z or whatever, with all times ... ⌘ Read more
Today, in partnership with IBM and in the spirit of open innovation, we’re releasing the source code to MS-DOS 4.00 under the MIT license. There’s a somewhat complex and fascinating history behind the 4.0 versions of DOS, as Microsoft partnered with IBM for portions of the code but also created a branch of DOS called Multitasking DOS that did not see a wide release. ... ⌘ Read more