The openSUSE project recently announced the second release candidate (RC2) of its Aeon Desktop, formerly known as MicroOS Desktop GNOME. Aside from the new coat of naming paint, Aeon breaks ground in a few other ways by dabbling with technologies not found in other openSUSE releases. The goal for Aeon is to provide automated system updates using snapshots that can be applied atomically ... ⌘ Read more
The openSUSE project recently announced the second release candidate (RC2) of its Aeon Desktop, formerly known as MicroOS Desktop GNOME. Aside from the new coat of naming paint, Aeon breaks ground in a few other ways by dabbling with technologies not found in other openSUSE releases. The goal for Aeon is to provide automated system updates using snapshots that can be applied atomically ... ⌘ Read more
When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman: With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ’90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding. ↫ Mustafa Suleyman This is absolute bullshit from the first word to the very last. None of t ... ⌘ Read more
The Apple ][ is one of the most iconic vintage computers of all time. But since Wozniak’s monster lasted all the way until 1993 (1995 if you could the IIe card, which I won’t count until I get one), it can be easy to forget that in 1977, it was a video extravaganza. The competitors– even much bigger and established companies like Commodore and Tandy– generally only had text modes, let alone pixel-addressable graphics, and they certainly ... ⌘ Read more
The Vector Packet Processor (VPP) is a framework for moving packets around at high rates. Its core concept is handling packets in groups known as “vectors,” which allows for the native use of vector processor instructions for packet classification and processing in different CPU architectures — currently amd64 and arm64. VPP can process packets at incredibly high rates and competes wi ... ⌘ Read more
So I learned something new today: there are companies that provide security patches for Windows that aren’t Microsoft. I never even considered this could be a thing, but it turns out that a paid service called 0patch seems to have been around for a long time, and the consensus seems to be that not only can it be trusted, it also sometimes provides patches sooner than Microsoft does. Tod ... ⌘ Read more
KWin had a very long standing bug report about bad performance of the Wayland session on older Intel integrated graphics. There have been many investigations into what’s causing this, with a lot of more specific performance issues being found and fixed, but none of them managed to fully fix the issue… until now. ↫ Xaver Hugl An excellent deep dive into a very annoying problem KWin on Wayland running on older Intel hardware was facing. It turns out t ... ⌘ Read more
Mozilla has announced it’s adding easy access to tool like ChatGPT, Gemini, and so to Firefox. Whether it’s a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. With that in mind, this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between ta ... ⌘ Read more
As cool as the organizer was, it was extremely limited in pretty much every way. Psion had got many things right in the first go, as reviewers were quick to admit, and that made iterating on the design somewhat easy. The Organiser II CM released in 1986 was built on the Hitachi HD6303X (Motorola 6803) clocked at 920kHz with 8K RAM and 32K ROM. The screen was a much improved dot matrix LCD with two lines of sixteen characters. This version also shipped with a little piezo beeper built in, a ... ⌘ Read more
In a few days, 29 June, FreeDOS will turn 30. This happens to make it one of the oldest, continuously active open source projects in the world, originally created because Jim Hall had heard Microsoft was going to kill DOS when the upcoming Windows 95 was going to be released. After seeing the excitement around Linux, he decided it an open source DOS would be a valuable time investment. I still used DOS, and I didn’t want to stop using DOS. And I looked at wh ... ⌘ Read more
The European Commission has informed Microsoft of its preliminary view that Microsoft has breached EU antitrust rules by tying its communication and collaboration product Teams to its popular productivity applications included in its suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365. ↫ European Commission press release Chalk this one up in the unsurprising column, too. Teams has infested Office, and ... ⌘ Read more
The transition to Wayland is nearing completion for most desktop Linux users. The most popular desktop Linux distribution in the world, Ubuntu, has made the call and is switching its NVIDIA users over to Wayland by default in the upcoming release of Ubuntu 24.10. The proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver has been the hold-out on Ubuntu in sticking to the GNOME X.Org session out-of-the-box rather than Wayland as has been the default for ... ⌘ Read more
It seems the success of the Framework laptops, as well the community’s relentless focus on demanding repairable devices and he ensuing legislation, are starting to have an impact. It wasn’t that long ago that Microsoft’s Surface devices were effectively impossible to repair, but with the brand new Snapdragon X Elite and Pro devices, the company has made an impressive U-turn, according to iFixIt. Both the new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro are exceptional ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has made OneDrive slightly more annoying for Windows 11 users. Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11’s initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it. Now, those setting up a new Windows computer the way Microsoft wants them to (in other words, connected to the internet an ... ⌘ Read more
Today, the European Commission has informed Apple of its preliminary view that its App Store rules are in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), as they prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content. In addition, the Commission opened a new non-compliance procedure against Apple over concerns that its new contractual requirements for third-party app developers and app stores, includin ... ⌘ Read more
I can’t believe this is considered something I need to write about, but it’s still a very welcome new feature that surprisingly has taken this long to become available: iOS and iPadOS 18 now allow you to format external storage devices. Last year when I began testing iPadOS 17 betas, I noticed the addition of options for renaming and erasing external drives in the Files app. I watched these options over the course of the beta cycle for iPadOS ... ⌘ Read more
One of my biggest concerns regarding the state of the web isn’t ads (easily blocked) or machine learning (the legal system isn’t going to be kind to that), but the possible demise of Firefox. I’ve long been worried that with the seemingly never-ending downward marketshare spiral Firefox is in – it’s at like 3% now on desktop, even less on mobile – Mozilla’s pretty much sole source of income will eventually pull the plug, le ... ⌘ Read more
Windows 3.0 Enhanced Mode introduced the ability to run MS-DOS programs in a virtual machine. This by itself was already quite an achievement, but it didn’t stop there. It also let you put the MS-DOS session in a window, and run it on the screen along with your other Windows programs. This was crazy. Here’s how it worked. ↫ Raymond Chen When Raymond Chen speaks, we all shut up, listen, and enjoy. ⌘ Read more
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, professor emeritus of Computer Science at VU Amsterdam, receives the ACM Software System Award for MINIX, which influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used operating systems, including Linux. Tanenbaum created MINIX 1.0 in 1987 to accompany his textbook, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. MINIX was a ... ⌘ Read more
There’s really a Linux distribution for everyone, it seems. EasyOS sounds like it’s going to be some Debian derivative with a theme or something, but it’s truly something different – in fact, it has such a unique philosophy and approach to everything I barely know where to even start. Everything in EasyOS runs in containers, in the distribution’s own custom container format, even entire desktop environments, and containers are configured entirely ... ⌘ Read more
Apple has announced it’s not shipping three of its tentpole new features, announced during WWDC, in the European Union: Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring, and SharePlay Screen Sharing. Ever since the introduction of especially Apple Intelligence, the company has been in hot water over the sourcing of its ... ⌘ Read more
It should be no secret to anyone reading OSNews that I’m not exactly a fan of Windows. While I grew up using MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x, the move to Windows XP was a sour one for me, and ever since I’ve vastly preferred first BeOS, and then Linux. When, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Wine community and Valve gaming on Linux became a boring, it-just-works affair, I said goodbye to my final gaming-only Windows installation about fo ... ⌘ Read more
ExectOS is a preemptive, reentrant multitasking operating system that implements the XT architecture which derives from NT architecture. It is modular, and consists of two main layers: microkernel and user modes. Its’ kernel mode has full access to the hardware and system resources and runs code in a protected memory area. It consists of executive services, which is itself made up on many modules that do specific tasks, a kernel and drivers. Unlike the NT, system does not f ... ⌘ Read more
Today just so happens to be the 40th birthday of X, the venerable windowing system that’s on its way out, at least in the Linux world. From the original announcement by Robert W. Scheifler: I’ve spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W. The code seems ... ⌘ Read more
Framework, the company making modular, upgradeable, and repairable laptops, and DeepComputing, the same company that’s making the DC ROMA II RISC-V laptop we talked about last week, have announced something incredibly cool: a brand new RISC-V mainboard that fits right into existing Framework 13 laptops. Sporting a RISC-V StarFive JH7110 SoC, this groundbreaking Mainboard ... ⌘ Read more
There’s incredibly good news for people who use accessibility tools on Linux, but who were facing serious, gamebreaking problems when trying to use Wayland. Matt Campbell, of the GNOME accessibility team, has been hard at work on an entirely new accessibility architecture for modern free desktops, and he’s got some impressive results to show for it already. I’ve now implemented enough of the new architecture that Or ... ⌘ Read more
After the very successful release of KDE Plasma 6.0, which moved the entire desktop environment and most of its applications over to Qt 6, fixed a whole slow of bugs, and streamlined the entire KDE desktop and its applications, it’s now time for KDE Plasma 6.1, where we’re going to see a much stronger focus on new features. While it’s merely a point release, it’s still a big one. The tentpole new feature of Plasma 6.1 is access to remote Plasma desktops. You can go into Settings and ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve always found the world of DOS versions and variants to be confusing, since most of it took place when I was very young (I’m from 1984) so I wasn’t paying much attention to computing quite yet, other than playing DOS games. One of the variants of DOS I never quite understood where it was from until much, much later, was DR-DOS. This this day, I pronounce this as “Doctor DOS”. If you’re also a little unclear on what, exactly, DR-DOS was, Bradford Morgan White has an excellent article ... ⌘ Read more
To lock subscribers into recurring monthly payments, Adobe would typically pre-select by default its most popular “annual paid monthly” plan, the FTC alleged. That subscription option locked users into an annual plan despite paying month to month. If they canceled after a two-week period, they’d owe Adobe an early termination fee (ETF) that costs 50 percent of their remaining annual subscription. The “material terms” ... ⌘ Read more
Cinnamon, the popular GTK desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint project, pushed out Cinnamon 6.2 today, which will serve as the default desktop for Linux Mint 22. It’s a relatively minor release, but it does contain a major new feature which is actually quite welcome: a new GTK frontend for GNOME Online Accounts, part of the XApp project. This makes it possible to use the excellent GNOME Online Accounts framework, without having to resort to a GNOME application – and will come ... ⌘ Read more
Less than a month after 3.5.0, IceWM is already shipping version 3.6.0. Once again not a major, earth-shattering release, it does contain at least one really cool feature that I think it pretty nifty: if you double-click on a window border, it will maximise just that side of the window. Pretty neat. For the rest, it’s small changes and bug fixes for this venerable window manager. ⌘ Read more
It seems that if you want to steer clear from having Facebook use your Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. data for machine learning training, you might want to consider moving to the European Union. Meta has apparently paused plans to process mounds of user data to bring new AI experiences to Europe. The decision comes after data regulators rebuffed the tech giant’s claims that ... ⌘ Read more
Way, way back in the cold and bleak days of 2021, I mentioned Vinix on OSNews, an operating system written in the V programming language. A few days ago, over on Mastodon, the official account for the V programming language sent out a screenshot showing Solitaite running on Vinix, showing off what the experimental operating system can do. The project doesn’t seem to really publish any changelogs or release notes, so it’s difficult to figure out what, exactly, is going on at the mom ... ⌘ Read more
I have a feeling Microsoft is really starting to feel some pressure about its plans to abandon Windows 10 next year. Data shows that 70% of Windows users are still using Windows 10, and this percentage has proven to be remarkably resilient, making it very likely that hundreds of millions of Windows users will be out of regular, mainstream support and security pa ... ⌘ Read more
Stranded on a desert island; lost in the forest; stuck in the snow; injured and unable to get back to civilization. Human beings have used their ingenuity for millennia to try to signal for rescue. there’s been a progression of technological innovations: smoke signals, mirrors, a loud whistle, a portable radio, a mobile phone. With each invention, it’s been possible to venture a little farther from populate ... ⌘ Read more
Way, way, way back in 2009, we reported on a small hobby operating system called StreamOS – version 0.21-RC1 had just been released that day. StreamOS was a 32-bit operating system written in Object Pascal using the Free Pascal Compiler, running on top of FreeDOS. It turns out that its creator, Oleksandr Natalenko (yes, the same person), recovered the old code, and republished it on Codeberg for posterity. It’s not a complete history, r ... ⌘ Read more
The complete source code for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) version of Doom has been released on archive.org. Although some of the code was partially released a few years ago, this is the first time the full source code has been made publicly available. ↫ Shaun James at GBAtemp The code was very close to being lost forever, down to a corrupted disk that had ... ⌘ Read more
Howard Oakley has written an interesting history of secure enclaves on the Mac, and when he touches upon “exclaves”, a new concept that doesn’t have a proper term yet, he mentions something interesting. While an enclave is a territory entirely surrounded by the territory of another state, an exclave is an isolated fragment of a state that exists separately from the main part of that state. Although exclave isn’t a term normally used in comput ... ⌘ Read more
Sometimes you come across a story that’s equally weird and delightful, and this is definitely one of them. Oleksandr Natalenko posted a link on Mastodon to a curious email sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which apparently gets sent to the LKML every single year. The message is very straightforward. Is it possible to write a kernel module which, when loaded, will blow the PC speaker? ↫ R.F. Burns on the LKML Since this g ... ⌘ Read more
Brussels is set to charge Apple over allegedly stifling competition on its mobile app store, the first time EU regulators have used new digital rules to target a Big Tech group. The European Commission has determined that the iPhone maker is not complying with obligations to allow app developers to “steer” users to offers outside its App Store without imposing fees on them, according t ... ⌘ Read more
Former employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others. ↫ Renee Dudley at ProPublica In light of Recall, a very dangerous game. ⌘ Read more
Google’s own Project Zero security research effort, which often finds and publishes vulnerabilities in both other companies’ and its own products, set its sights on Android once more, this time focusing on third-party kernel drivers. Android’s open-source ecosystem has led to an incredible diversity of manufacturers and vendors developing software that runs on a broad variety of hardware. This hardware requires supporting drivers, meaning that many different cod ... ⌘ Read more
After initially announcing it was going to change its Recall feature and then pulling the preview Windows release containing the feature, Microsoft has now given in almost entirely and is delaying Recall altogether. Instead of shipping it on every new Copilot+ PC, they’re going to release it as an optional feature for Windows Insiders. Today, we are communicating an additional update on the Recall (preview) feature for Copilot+ PCs. Recall will now shift from a previe ... ⌘ Read more
Speaking of PCs that don’t use x86 chips, Canonical and DeepComputing today announced a new RISC-V laptop running Ubuntu, available for pre-order in a few days. It’s the successor to the DC-ROMA, which shipped last year. Adding to a long list of firsts, the new DC-ROMA laptop II is the first to feature SpacemiT’s SoC K1 – with its 8-cores RISC-V CPU running at up to 2.0GHz with 16G ... ⌘ Read more
In the last 8 months Qualcomm has made a lot of interesting claims for their high-performance Windows-on-Arm SoC – many of which will be put to the test in the coming weeks. But beyond all the performance claims and bluster amidst what is shaping up to be a highly competitive environment for PC CPUs, there’s an even more fundamental question about the Snapdragon ... ⌘ Read more
Two days ago, I broke the news that Mozilla removed several Firefox extensions from the add-on store in Russia, after pressure from Russian censors. Mozilla provided me with an official statement, which seemed to highlight that the decision was not final, and it seems I was right – today, probably helped by the outcry our story caused, Mozilla has announced it’s reversing the decis ... ⌘ Read more
Surprisingly quietly, in the middle of Apple’s WWDC, Google’s ChromeOS team has made a rather massive announcement that seems to be staying a bit under the radar. Google is announcing today that it is replacing many of ChromeOS’ current relatively standard Linux-based subsystems with the comparable subsystems from Android. To continue rolling out new Google AI features to use ... ⌘ Read more
The new Windows on ARM Copilot+ PC thing, running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips, isn’t even out the door yet, and we’re already dealing with legal proceedings. But the main conversation among conference attendees was over how a contract dispute between Arm Holdings and Qualcomm, which work together to make the chips powering these new laptops, could abruptly halt the shipment of new PCs that i ... ⌘ Read more
The extensible scheduler “sched\\_ext” code has proven quite versatile for opening up better Linux gaming performance, more quickly prototyping new scheduler changes, Ubuntu/Canonical has been evaluating it for pursuing a more micro-kernel like design, and many other interesting approaches with it. Yet it’s remained out of tree but that is now changing with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle. Linus Torvalds as the b ... ⌘ Read more
This is an attempt to turn OpenBSD into a Whonix or Tails alternative, although if you really need that level of privacy, use a system from this list and not the present guide. It is easy to spot OpenBSD using network fingerprinting, this can not be defeated, you can not hide the fact you use OpenBSD to network operators. I did this guide as a challenge for fun, but I also know some users have a use for this level of privacy. ↫ Solène Rapenne Written by OpenBSD developer ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft recently announced some big changes to the Recall feature in Windows, and now it’s pulled the Release Preview version which contained Recall entirely. It’s likely not a coincidence that Microsoft also quietly pulled the build of the Windows 11 24H2 update that it had been testing in its Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders. It’s not unheard of for Micr ... ⌘ Read more
A few days ago, I was pointed to a post on the Mozilla forums, in which developers of Firefox extensions designed to circumvent Russian censorship were surprised to find that their extensions were suddenly no longer available within Russia. The extension developers and other users in the thread were obviously not amused, and since they had received no warning or any other fo ... ⌘ Read more
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote has come to a close — and the company had a whole lot to share. We got our first look at the AI features coming to Apple’s devices and some major updates across the company’s operating systems. If you missed out on watching the keynote live, we’ve gathered all the biggest announcements that you can check out below. ↫ Emma Roth at The Verge Most of the stuff Apple announced aren’t particularly i ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve long been waiting for a powerful ARM laptop that can run Linux comfortably, and it seems that with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite SoC, that’s finally going to happen. We talked earlier about how for once, Qualcomm is taking Linux support for their new laptop-focused processors very seriously, and that promise and associated effort is paying dividend. Tuxedo, a popular Linux OEM from Germany, has a ... ⌘ Read more
NetBSD 10 was released recently, so a lot of people are experimenting with it and writing down their thoughts. I’ve got two of those for you today, to help you in case you, too, want to install NetBSD 10 and play around with, or just use, it. First, what if you want to install NetBSD 10 on a UEFI system, but with full disk encryption in case your device gets stolen? It turns out there a ... ⌘ Read more
Last night, I ran through the ZFSBootMenu documentation guide for Void and followed it both on a VM and then on an external SATA HDD plugged through a USB case, taking some notes and getting a general idea of the process. The Void installer does not support ZFS out of the box, so the Void Handbook itself recommends the ZFSBootMenu documentation before its own (a manual chroot installation) when it comes to doing a ZFS-on-root install. This guide from ZFSBootMenu is what we’ll be following throug ... ⌘ Read more
Now that we have the MenuetOS 64 disk image file (M6414490.IMG), it is time to analyze! We will analyze the image file both statically and dynamically. Static analysis is reading and analyzing code without running it, whereas dynamic analysis is running the code and watching how it changes registers and memory during execution. Each analysis mode compliments the other; there are some things that can only be discerned through co ... ⌘ Read more
The very short version: Unix PIDs do start at 0! PID 0 just isn’t shown to userspace through traditional APIs. PID 0 starts the kernel, then retires to a quiet life of helping a bit with process scheduling and power management. Also the entire web is mostly wrong about PID 0, because of one sentence on Wikipedia from 16 years ago. There’s a slightly longer short version right at the end, or you can stick with me for the extremely long middle bit! But surely you could just google what PID 0 is, right? W ... ⌘ Read more
Adobe Creative Cloud users opened their apps yesterday to find that they were forced to agree to new terms, which included some frightening-sounding language. It seemed to suggest Adobe was claiming rights over their work. Worse, there was no way to continue using the apps, to request support to clarify the terms, or even uninstall the apps, without agreeing to the terms. ↫ Ben Lovejoy ... ⌘ Read more
We haven’t been hearing much out of the Fuchsia team anymore after said team was hit hard by the Google layoffs, but we’ve got some news so my fancy Fuchsia database category doesn’t go entirely to waste. As Phoronix highlights, Fuchsia support is being upstreamed to Mesa 3D, indicating that no, Fuchsia is not entirely dead. This adds fairly standard support for Fuchsia in src/util. It’s being used in downstream forks of Lavapipe and it’s u ... ⌘ Read more
The US Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission reportedly plan investigations into whether Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI are snuffing out competition in artificial intelligence technology. The agencies struck a deal on how to divide up the investigations, The New York Times reported yesterday. Under this deal, the Justice Department will take the lead role in investigating Nvidia’s behavior wh ... ⌘ Read more
It turns out that the storm of criticism Microsoft’s recently unveiled Recall feature has actually pushed Microsoft to change its mind and make some very significant changes to the feature. Today, after over a week of sustained criticism and worries, Redmond announced it’s going to implement Recall very differently. First and foremost, instead of Recall being enabled by default and only configurable after i ... ⌘ Read more
I bought a Topton GM1 Industrial Mini PC for my HomeLab. It is aimed at running Slackware Linux but I wanted to have a quick look at how well BSD OSes support it out-of-the-box. ↫ Joel Carnat That’s really all there’s to this story. I just really, really love tiny industrial and office computers and thin clients, and every time I see another one for sale I really have to stop myself from buying one I have absolutely no use for. ... ⌘ Read more
Before PC users can enjoy everything Windows 11 has on tap, they must first enter an e-mail address that’s linked to a Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, you’ll be asked to create one before you can start setting it up. A frequently used trick to circumvent this block is a small but ingenious step. By entering a random e-mail address and password, which doesn’t exist and causes the link to fa ... ⌘ Read more
As some of you will know, I recently started working on OSNews as my full-time job, and that means I sometimes need to be annoying and remind you all that I need your help in keeping the website going. Ad income has been going down the drain for years and years now, so your support is crucial in keeping OSNews online. We’ve been providing you with the latest technology news for over 25 years now, and I’d really like to keep things going for another 25 years. ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve barely scratched the surface, but there’s enough here for me to seriously consider a switch to it as my primary Linux distro for testing and servers. I love that htop(1) and lsof(1) only shows a small list of recognisable processes, that it uses OpenRC, that package management seems straight forward, and that it’s so simple to configure. I’ve wondered what a modern, functional “Occam’s Linux” would look like. This is it. ↫ Ruben Schade Alpine is very popular am ... ⌘ Read more
You know what could really use a dose of “AI”? Your BIOS. aiBIOS leverages an LLM to integrate AI capabilities into Insyde Software’s flagship firmware solution, InsydeH2O® UEFI BIOS. It provides the ability to interpret the PC user’s request, analyze their specific hardware, and parse through the LLM’s extensive knowledge base of BIOS and computer terminology to make the appropriate changes to the BIOS Setup. This breakthrough technology helps address a major hurdle ... ⌘ Read more
Starlark is a small programming language, designed as a simple dialect of Python and intended primarily for embedded use in applications. Some people might say it’s a bit like Lua with Python syntax, but I think there are many interesting bits to discuss. The language is now open-source and used in many other applications and companies. As I led the design and implementation of Starlark, I’d like to write a bit more about it. ↫ Laurent Le Brun I’m sure there ... ⌘ Read more
The short version is this: In its current form, Recall takes screenshots and uses OCR to grab the information on your screen; it then writes the contents of windows plus records of different user interactions in a locally stored SQLite database to track your activity. Data is stored on a per-app basis, presumably to make it easier for Microsoft’s app-exclusion featur ... ⌘ Read more
OpenAI’s efforts to produce less factually false output from its ChatGPT chatbot are not enough to ensure full compliance with European Union data rules, a task force at the EU’s privacy watchdog said. “Although the measures taken in order to comply with the transparency principle are beneficial to avoid misinterpretation of the output of ChatGPT, they are not sufficient to ... ⌘ Read more
GNU Nano, by far my favourite text editor when using the command line, released version 8.0 recently – and by recently I mean a month ago – and in it, there’s a pretty interesting additional feature that should make using Nano a little bit more straightforward for those not used to its key combinations. Command-line option –modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ... ⌘ Read more
Remember when I said the honeymoon with AMD’s consumer-friendly chipset and socket support policy would eventually end? Well, while this is not exactly that, it will make a lot of people very unhappy. While AMD, as does any other company, was boastful about its product touting ... ⌘ Read more
A new point release in the FreeBSD 14 series – the first one, in fact, not counting 14.0. FreeBSD 14.1 adds SIMD implementations of string and memory operations on amd64 in the C library to improve performance, improvements to the sound system, such as device hotplug support, and the latest versions of OpenZFS, clang/llvm, and OpenSSH. FreeBSD 14.0 users can just upgrade to FreeBSD 14.1, or you can do a fresh install, of course. ⌘ Read more
Hot on the heels of AMD, here’s Intel’s next-generation processor, this time for the laptop market. Overall, Lunar Lake represents their second generation of disaggregated SoC architecture for the mobile market, replacing the Meteor Lake architecture in the lower-end space. At this time, Intel has disclosed that it uses a 4P+4E (8 core) design, with hyper-threading/SMT disabled, so the total thread count supported by the ... ⌘ Read more
About a week ago, there has been a little addition to the 3dbrew wiki page about 3DS cartridges (carts) that outlines the technical details of how the 3DS cartridge controller and a 3DS cartridge talk to each other. I would like to take this opportunity to also include the 3DS itself in the conversation to illuminate which part of which device performs which step. I will then proceed to outline where I think the corresponding design decisions ori ... ⌘ Read more
We’ve got some possibly sad, possibly great news. Today, Andreas Kling, the amazing developer who started SerenityOS as a way to regain a sense or normalcy after completing his drug rehab program, has announced he’s stepping down as the ‘big dictator for life’ of the SerenityOS project, handing leadership over the maintainer group. The other half of the coin, however, ... ⌘ Read more
Another month, another Redox progress report. The Rust-based operating system, headed by system76 engineer Jeremy Soller, has made a big move by replacing Redox’ Orbital file manager, text editor and terminal by their COSMIC counterparts, COSMIC Files, COSMIC Editor and COSMIC Terminal, in the default Redox installation. COSMIC is the Rust-based desktop environment system76 is currently developing for their Linux dis ... ⌘ Read more
There’s no denying that not everyone is happy with the state of the GTK world, and I, too, have argued that GNOME’s massive presence and seeming unwillingness to cooperate with or even consider the existence of other GTK-based desktop environments is doing real, measurable harm to the likes of Xfce, Cinnamon, and others. A major root cause is a feeling that GTK is nothing but a vessel for GNOME, and that the project doesn’t really seem to ca ... ⌘ Read more
In regards to performance, AMD is touting an average (geomean) IPC increase in desktop workloads for Zen 5 of 16%. And with the new desktop Ryzen chips’ turbo clockspeeds remaining largely identical to their Ryzen 7000 predecessors, this should translate into similar performance expectations for the new chips. The AMD Ryzen 9000 series will also launch on the AM5 socke ... ⌘ Read more
Tock is an embedded operating system designed for running multiple concurrent, mutually distrustful applications on Cortex-M and RISC-V based embedded platforms. Tock’s design centers around protection, both from potentially malicious applications and from device drivers. Tock uses two mechanisms to protect different components of the operating system. First, the kernel and device drivers are written in Rust, ... ⌘ Read more
The act of discarding a message that does not exist must therefore do one of two things. It may cause the message contents to also cease to exist. Alternately, it might not affect the existence but only the accessibility of message contents. Perhaps they continue to exist, but discarding the message (which already did not exist) causes the copy operation to cease being invokable on the message contents (even though they do continue to exist). The story of existence has many m ... ⌘ Read more
If, for some reason, you’re still using Chrome or one of the browsers that put a little hat on Chrome and call it a different browser, the time you’re going to want to consider switching to the only real alternative – Firefox – is getting closer and closer. Yesterday, Google has announced that the end of Manifest V2 is now truly here. Starting on June 3 on the Chrome Beta, Dev and Canary channels, if users still have Manifest V2 extensions installed, some will s ... ⌘ Read more
Wayland 1.23.0 has been released. This new release includes the usual bugfixes and protocol clarifications, a number of new features few of us will really understand because we lack the expertise, and most importantly of all: OpenBSD support. That’s it. That’s the news. ⌘ Read more
Real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS integrates the PREEMPT\\_RT patch on AMD64 and ARM64. As the de-facto Linux real-time implementation, PREEMPT\\_RT increases predictability by modifying the existing kernel code. With time-bound responses for mission-critical latency requirements, Real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS provides deterministic processing to the most demanding workloads across industries, from manufacturing and automotive to the critical infrastru ... ⌘ Read more
Servo, the Rust-based browser engine originally started by Mozilla but since spun off into an entity under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, has published another monthly update. As almost every month, there’s been a lot of progress on rendering tech I don’t quite understand, and further improved support for various standards. Another major focus is the ongoing font system rework, which is yielding not only vastly improved support for f ... ⌘ Read more
Twenty-five years. A quarter century. That’s how long we’ve been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck. I only became part of Krita in 2003, when Krita was still part of KDE’s suite of productivity applications, KOffice, later renamed to Calligra… And I became maintainer of Krita in 2004, ... ⌘ Read more
About a week ago I reported on a case study from Dell and FreeBSD, about Dell’s ThinOS thin client operating system, which basically consists of a proprietary Dell GUI running on top of, at the moment, FreeBSD 12 (they’re moving to FreeBSD 14 for the next ThinOS release). Well, this got me interested – I’ve always been fascinated by thin clients, and a Dell/Wyse FreeBSD ‘distribution’ is j ... ⌘ Read more
Over on the GNU config-patches mailing list, Zack Weinberg is looking for help identifying a number of ancient operating systems and vendors. These are probably all either vendor or OS names from the late 1980s or early 1990s. Can anyone help me fill out the following list of things that ought to appear in testsuite/config-sub.data, if I knew what to put in place of the question marks? ???-pc533 ???-pc533-??????-si ... ⌘ Read more
Google is killing off a messaging service! This one is the odd “Google Business Messaging” service—basically an instant messaging client that is built into Google Maps. If you looked up a participating business in Google Maps or Google Search on a phone, the main row of buttons in the place card would read something like “Call,” “Chat,” “Directions,” and “Website.” That “Chat” button is the service we’re ta ... ⌘ Read more
Speaking of The Verge, its parent company Vox Media, along with The Atlantic, have signed a deal with OpenAI. Two more media companies have signed licensing agreements with OpenAI, allowing their content to be used to train its AI models and be shared inside of ChatGPT. The Atlantic and Vox Media — The Verge’s parent company — both announced deals with OpenAI on Wednesday. ↫ Emilia David at The Verge In the case of V ... ⌘ Read more
When you launch a game on a Snapdragon on a Windows laptop, you might get an AI frame rate boost from Microsoft’s mysterious Auto Super Resolution (Auto SR) feature. But while Microsoft hasn’t fully explained how the feature works, The Verge can now confirm it’s not Qualcomm technology, not exclusive to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chips, and not exclusive to specific games, eit ... ⌘ Read more
The Turbo9 is a pipelined microprocessor IP written in Verilog that executes a superset of the Motorola 6809 instruction set. It is a new modern microarchitecture with 16-bit internal datapaths that balances high performance vs small area / low power. The Turbo9R with a 16-bit memory interface achieves 0.69 DMIPS/MHz which is 3.8 times faster than Motorola’s original 8-bit MC6809 implementation. It is an active graduate research project at the Dep ... ⌘ Read more
Few things in technology excites me more than an amazing computer I have never heard of before – especially one with pedigree. Many people take a casual glance at this machine and say, “Isn’t that an overgrown word processor?” And one could certainly think so, in part because of its keyboard-centric operation, but mostly from the utterly uncomprehending way Canon advertised it in 1987. Canon dubbed the Cat a “work processor” because of its built-in telecommunications, modem and word pro ... ⌘ Read more
Aside from that, the company also announced Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 this week. The company has also published the minimum system requirements as well as supported processor families. They have been categorized as Preferred and Optional. Interestingly, SSD has been added as a minimum system requirement, which has been a rumour about the client OS since ... ⌘ Read more
The ELF object file format is adopted by many UNIX-like operating systems. While I’ve previously delved into the control structures of ELF and its predecessors, tracing the historical evolution of ELF and its relationship with the System V ABI can be interesting in itself. ↫ MaskRay The article wasn’t lying. I had no reason to know this – and I’m pretty sure most of you didn’t either – but it turns out the standards that define ELF got caught up in the ... ⌘ Read more
systemd uses DBus as the mechanism to interact with it. This article introduces just enough DBus concepts and the usage of busctl to communicate with systemd. These concepts should be useful when using DBus libraries. ↫ Beartama Exactly what it says on the tin. ⌘ Read more
Earlier this month, we talked about the arrival of the new CAMM2 memory module standard, specifically designed to make replaceable memory modules as fast and capable as soldered memory. There’s technically no reason for CAMM2 to not also be beneficial to desktop use, and it turns out MSI is experimenting with this. MSI on Thursday published the first image of a new desktop motherboard that supports the innovative DDR5 compression attached memor ... ⌘ Read more
IceWM, the venerable window manager we’ve all used at some point in our lives, has released a new version, 3.5.0. It’s a relatively minor release, so you’ve got things like a new install option which will install an extra theme, a fix for porting to NetBSD 10, translation updates, and more such small improvements. The AddressBar, a command line in the taskbar that can be summoned with ctrl+alt+space, also got some love, with file argument completion and support for the cd and pwd commands. ... ⌘ Read more
But Google results are a zero-sum game. If the search engine sends traffic to one site, it has to take it from another, and the effects on the losers in this Reddit equation are just as dramatic. “Google’s just committing war on publisher websites,” Ray says. “It’s almost as if Google designed an algorithm update to specifically go after small bloggers. I’ve talked to so many people w ... ⌘ Read more
It turns out that digital rights management and its consequences extend even beyond your passing when it comes to Steam. Valve has made it clear that no, you cannot will your Steam account or games to someone else when you die. The issue of digital game inheritability gained renewed attention this week as a ResetEra poster quoted a Steam support response asking about transferring Steam account ownership via a la ... ⌘ Read more
These sources, as clearly stated in the repo’s readme, are the 8088 assembly language sources from 10th Feb 1983, and are being open-sourced for historical reference and educational purposes. This means we will not be accepting PRs that modify the source in any way. ↫ Rich Turner I’m loving all these open source releases from Microsoft, but honestly, I’d wish the pace was a little higher and we’d get to some more recent stuff. Open sourcing early versions of MS-DOS an ... ⌘ Read more