It kind of goes by under the radar, but aside from HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, there’s another traditional classic UNIX still in active development today: UnixWare (and its sibling, OpenServer). Owned and developed by Xinuos, UnixWare and other related code and IP was acquired by them when the much-hated SCO crashed and burned about 15 years ago or so, and they’ve been maintaining it ever since. About a year ago, Xinuos ... ⌘ Read more
It kind of goes by under the radar, but aside from HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, there’s another traditional classic UNIX still in active development today: UnixWare (and its sibling, OpenServer). Owned and developed by Xinuos, UnixWare and other related code and IP was acquired by them when the much-hated SCO crashed and burned about 15 years ago or so, and they’ve been maintaining it ever since. About a year ago, Xinuos ... ⌘ Read more
Late last year, the MaXX Interactive Desktop, the Linux (and BSD) version of the IRIX desktop, sprung back to life with a new release and a detailed roadmap. Thanks to a unique licensing agreement with SGI, MaXX’ developer, Eric Masson, has been able to bring a lot of the SGI user experience over to Linux and BSD, and as promised, we have a new release: the final version of MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0. It’s codenamed Octane, and anyone who knows the ... ⌘ Read more
Upstart was an event-based replacement for the traditional System V init (sysvinit) system on Ubuntu, introduced to bring a modern and more flexible way of handling system startup and service management. It emerged in the mid-2000s, during a period when sysvinit’s age and limitations were becoming more apparent, especially with regard to concurrency and dependency handling. Upstart was developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, with the aim of reducing boot time ... ⌘ Read more
After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows’ system font. Problem solved! Can y ... ⌘ Read more
Geico, an American insurance company, is building a live-patching solution for the Linux kernel, called TuxTape. TuxTape is an in-development kernel livepatching ecosystem that aims to aid in the production and distribution of kpatch patches to vendor-independent kernels. This is done by scraping the Linux CNA mailing list, prioritizing CVEs by severity, and determining applicability of the patches to the configured kernel(s). Applicability of patches i ... ⌘ Read more
Since a number of GTK developer came together at FOSDEM, the project figured now was as good a time as any to give an update on what’s coming in GTK. First, GTK is implementing some hard cut-offs for old platforms – Windows 10 and macOS 10.15 are now the oldest supported versions, which will make development quite a bit easier and will simplify several parts of the codebase. Windows 10 was released in 2 ... ⌘ Read more
You might expect PDF files to only be comprised of static documents, but surprisingly, the PDF file format supports Javascript with its own separate standard library. Modern browsers (Chromium, Firefox) implement this as part of their PDF engines. However, the APIs that are available in the browser are much more limited. The full specfication for the JS in PDFs was only ever implemented by Adobe Acrobat, and it contains some ridicul ... ⌘ Read more
GNU Guix is a package manager for GNU/Linux systems. It is designed to give users more control over their general-purpose and specialized computing environments, and make these easier to reproduce over time and deploy to one or many devices. ↫ GNU Guix website Guix is basically GNU’s approach to a reproducible, functional package manager, very similar to Nix because, well, it’s based on Nix. GNU also has a Linux distribution built around Nix, the GNU Guix System, which is fully ‘libre’ as al ... ⌘ Read more
We talk about the Genode project and Sculpt OS quite regularly on OSNews, but every time I’ve tried using Sculpt OS, I’ve always found it so different and so unique compared to everything else that I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I assume this stems from nothing but my own shortcomings, because the Genode project often hammers on the fact that Sculpt OS is in daily-driver use by a lot of people with ... ⌘ Read more
If you have type 1 diabetes, you need to keep track of and manage your blood glucose levels closely, as if these levels dip too low, it can quickly spiral into a medical emergency. Andrew Childs’ 9 year old son has type 1 diabetes, and Childs was unhappy with any of the current offerings on the market for children to keep track of their blood glucose levels. Most people suggested an Apple Watch, but he found the Apple Watch “too much device” for a kid, ... ⌘ Read more
Since its inception, Let’s Encrypt has been sending expiration notification emails to subscribers that have provided an email address to us. We will be ending this service on June 4, 2025. ↫ Josh Aas on the Let’s Encrypt website They’re ending the expiration notification service because it’s costly, adds a ton of complexity to their systems, and constitutes a privacy risk because of all the email addresses the ... ⌘ Read more
The Heirloom Project provides traditional implementations of standard Unix utilities. In many cases, they have been derived from original Unix material released as Open Source by Caldera and Sun. Interfaces follow traditional practice; they remain generally compatible with System V, although extensions that have become common use over the course of time are sometimes provided. Most utilities are also included in a variant that aims at POSIX conformance. On the interior, technologies for th ... ⌘ Read more
Regardless, the fact that Android’s Linux Terminal can run graphical apps like Doom now is good news. Hopefully we’ll be able to run more complex desktop-class Linux programs in the future. I tried running GIMP, for example, but it didn’t work. Eventually, Android should be able to run Linux apps as well as Chromebooks can, as I believe one of the goals ... ⌘ Read more
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a someone mentioning macOS is a UNIX approaches 1. In fact, it was only late last year that The Open Group announced that macOS 15.0 was, once again, certified as UNIX, continuing Apple’s long-standing tradition of certifying macOS releases as “real” UNIX®. What does any of this actually, mean, though? Well, it turns out that if you actually dive into Apple’s conformance statements for macOS’ ... ⌘ Read more
With the Linux 6.13 kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman described the level of Rust support as a “tipping point” for Rust drivers with more of the Rust infrastructure having been merged. Now for the Linux 6.14 kernel, Greg describes the state of the Rust driver possibilities as “almost at the “write a real driver in rust” stage now, depending on what you want to do.“ ↫ Michael ... ⌘ Read more
OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property. ↫ Cristina Criddle and Eleanor Olcott for the FT This is more ironic than writing a song called Ironic that lists situations that aren’t actually ... ⌘ Read more
Google, on its Google Maps naming policy, back in 2008: By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. Google, today, in 2025: Google has confirmed that Google Maps will soon ... ⌘ Read more
Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to play simple music through the PC speaker, and back in the day, I remember that the format “ZZM” existed, so you could enjoy the square wave tunes outside of the games. But imagine my surprise in 2025 to find that, while the Museum of ZZT does have a ZZM Audio section, it recommends t ... ⌘ Read more
A bug in the ROM for the Macintosh II was recently discovered that causes a crash when booting in 32-bit mode. Doug Brown discovered and documented the bug while playing with the MAME debugger. Why did it never show up before? It seems a quirk in Motorola’s 68030 CPU inadvertently fixes it when executing an illegal instruction that shou ... ⌘ Read more
Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, the original smartwatch maker, made a major announcement today together with Google. Pebble was originally bought by Fitbit and in turn Fitbit was then bought by Google, but Migicovsky always wanted to to go back to his original idea and create a brand new smartwatch. PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build, alongside our fantastic product and QA teams. Repro ... ⌘ Read more
Speaking of “AI”, the Chinese company DeepSeek has lobbed a grenade dead-centre into the middle of the “AI” bubble, and it’s been incredibly entertaining to watch. DeepSeek has released several new “AI” models, which seem to rival or even surpass OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT models – but with a massive twist: DeepSeek, b ... ⌘ Read more
Apparently, since the beginning of the year, AI bots have been ensuring that websites can only respond to regular inquiries with a delay. The founder of Linux Weekly News (LWN-net), Jonathan Corbet, reports that the news site is therefore often slow to respond. The AI scraper bots cause a DDoS, a distributed denial-of-service attack. At times, the AI bots would clog the lines with hundreds of IP addresses simultaneously as soon as they decided ... ⌘ Read more
The Linux kernel has become such an integral, core part of pretty much all aspects of the technology world, and corporate contributions to the kernel make up such a huge chunk of the kernel’s ongoing development, it’s easy to forget that some parts of the kernel are still maintained by some lone person in Jacksonville, Nebraska, or whatever. Sadly, we were reminded of this today when the sole maintainer of ... ⌘ Read more
Basically, this seems to mean applications will no longer be allowed to limit themselves to phone size when running on devices with larger screens, like tablets. Other tidbits in this first beta include predictive back support for 3-button navigation, support for the Advanced Professional Video codec from Samsung, among other things. It’s still quite early in the release process, so more is sure to come, and some ... ⌘ Read more
Snowdrop OS was born of my childhood curiosity around what happens when a PC is turned on, the mysteries of bootable disks, and the hidden aspects of operating systems. It is a 16-bit real mode operating system for the IBM PC architecture. I designed and developed this homebrew OS from scratch, using only x86 assembly language. ↫ Snowdrop OS’ website I have created and includ ... ⌘ Read more
NixBSD is an attempt to make a reproducible and declarable BSD, based on NixOS. Although theoretically much of this work could be copied to build other BSDs, all work thus far has been focused on building a FreeBSD distribution. ↫ NixBSD GitHub page Look, it’s my job to make sure I use and am familiar with as many operating systems and related tools as possible. As much as you guys support OSNews on Patreon or Ko-Fi, it’s g ... ⌘ Read more
SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer, has released version 3.2.0 of its development library. In case you don’t know what SDL is: Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D. It is used by video playback software, emulators, and popular games including Valve‘s award winning catalog and many Humble Bundle games. ↫ SDL website This new release has a lot of impr ... ⌘ Read more
The operating system I’m not cool enough to run has pushed out a new release: 9front “THIS TIME DEFINITELY” is now available. 9front is a fork of plan9, created after plan9 languished at Bell Labs. This release enables gefs, the new file system, in the installer, “ip/ipconfig now support dhcpv6 dynamic allocations and handles prefix expirations”, and it comes with some smaller changes, too, of course. Despite every piece of evidence to the contrary, I am s ... ⌘ Read more
I believe consumers, as a right, should be able to install software of their choosing to any computing device that is owned outright. This should apply regardless of the computer’s form factor. In addition to traditional computing devices like PCs and laptops, this right should apply to devices like mobile phones, “smart home” appliances, and even industrial equipment like tractors. In 2025, we’re ultra-connected via a network of devices we do not have full control over. Much of this has t ... ⌘ Read more
How do you fit a 250kB dictionary in 64kB of RAM and still perform fast lookups? For reference, even with modern compression techniques like gzip -9, you can’t compress this file below 85kB. In the 1970s, Douglas McIlroy faced this exact challenge while implementing the spell checker for Unix at AT&T. The constraints of the PDP-11 computer meant the entire dictionary needed to fit in just 64kB of RAM. A seemingly impossible task. ↫ Abhinav Upadhyay They still managed to ... ⌘ Read more
GrapheneOS (written GOS from now on) is an Android based operating system that focuses security. It is only compatible with Google Pixel devices for multiple reasons: availability of hardware security components, long term support (series 8 and 9 are supported at least 7 years after release) and the hardware has a good quality / price ratio. The goal of GOS is to provide users a lot more control about what their smartphone is doing. A main profile is used by default (the owner ... ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.13 comes with the introduction of the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for benefiting multi-CCD Ryzen X3D processors, the new AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” server processors will now default to AMD P-State rather than ACPI CPUFreq for better power efficiency, the start of Intel Xe3 graphics bring-up, support for many older (pre-M1) Apple devices like numerous iPads and iPhones, NVMe 2.1 specification support, and AutoFDO and Propeller optimization support when compiling the Linux kernel with ... ⌘ Read more
It’s been about 18 months, but we’ve got a new release for MorphOS, the Amiga-like operating system for PowerPC Macs and some other PowerPC-based machines. Going through the list of changes, it seems MorphOS 3.19 focuses heavily on fixing bugs and addressing issues, rather than major new features or earth-shattering changes. Of note are several small but important updates, like updated versions of OpenSSL and OpenSSH, as well as a ton of new filetype definitions – and so much more. Havin ... ⌘ Read more
Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, with ... ⌘ Read more
Normally I’m not that interested in reporting on news coming from OpenAI, but today is a little different – the company launched SearchGPT, a search engine that’s supposed to rival Google, but at the same time, they’re also kind of not launching a search engine that’s supposed to rival Google. What? We’re testing SearchGPT, a prototype of new search features designed to combine the strength of our AI models with information from the web to give you ... ⌘ Read more
Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is a feature that lets a processor handle instructions from two different threads at the same time. But have you ever wondered how this actually works? How does the processor keep track of two threads and manage its resources between them? In this article, we’re going to break it all down. Understanding the nuts and bolts of SMT will help you decide ... ⌘ Read more
In what started last year as a handful of reports about instability with Intel’s Raptor Lake desktop chips has, over the last several months, grown into a much larger saga. Facing their biggest client chip instability impediment in decades, Intel has been under increasing pressure to figure out the root cause of the issue and fix it, as claims of damaged chips have stacked ... ⌘ Read more
Choosing an operating system for new technology can be crucial for the success of any project. Years down the road, this decision will continue to inform the speed and efficiency of development. But should you build the infrastructure yourself or rely on a proven system? When faced with this decision, many companies have chosen, and continue to choose, FreeBSD. Few operating systems offer the immediate high performance and security of ... ⌘ Read more
Not everything made by KDE uses C++. This is probably obvious to some people, but it’s worth mentioning nevertheless. And I don’t mean this as just “well duh, KDE uses QtQuick which is written with C++ and QML”. I also don’t mean this as “well duh, Qt has a lot of bindings to other languages”. I mean explicitly “KDE has tools written primarily in certain languages and specialized formats”. ↫ Thiago Sueto If you ever wanted to contribute to KDE bu ... ⌘ Read more
The assault on a user’s freedom to install whatever they want on what is supposed to be their phone continues. This time, it’s Samsung adding an additional blocker to users installing applications from outside the Play Store and its own mostly useless Galaxy Store. Technically, Android already blocks sideloading by default at an operating system level. The permission that’s needed to silently install new apps without prompting the user, ... ⌘ Read more
This story just never ever ends. After delays, changes in plans, more delays, we now have more changed plans. After years of stalling, Google has now announced it is, in fact, not going to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome by default. In light of this, we are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new exper ... ⌘ Read more
A story that’s been persistently making the rounds since the CrowdStrike event is that while several airline companies were affected in one way or another, Southwest Airlines escaped the mayhem because they were still using windows 3.1. It’s a great story that fits the current zeitgeist about technology and its role in society, underlining that what is claimed to be technological progress is nothing but trouble, and that it’s ... ⌘ Read more
“Dell UNIX? I didn’t know there was such a thing.” A couple of weeks ago I had my new XO with me for breakfast at a nearby bakery café. Other patrons were drawn to seeing an XO for the first time, including a Linux person from Dell. I mentioned Dell UNIX and we talked a little about the people who had worked on Dell UNIX. He expressed surprise that mention of Dell UNIX evokes the above quote so often and pointed out that Emacs source still has #ifdef for Dell UNIX. Quick Go ... ⌘ Read more
This is an attempt at building an OpenBSD desktop than could be used by newcomers or by people that don’t care about tinkering with computers and just want a working daily driver for general tasks. Somebody will obviously need to know a bit of UNIX but we’ll try to limit it to the minimum. ↫ Joel Carnat An excellent, to-the-point, no-nonsense guide about turning a default OpenBSD installation into a desktop operating system running Xfce. You definitely don’t nee ... ⌘ Read more
Only yesterday, I mentioned one of the main reasons I decided to switch back to Fedora from OpenBSD were performance issues – and one of them was definitely the lack of hardware acceleration for video decoding/encoding. The lack of such technology means that decoding/encoding video is done using the processor, which is far less efficient than letting your GPU do it – which results in performance issues like stutterin ... ⌘ Read more
NetWare 386 or 3.0 was a very limited release, with very few copies sold before it was superseded by newer versions. As such, it was considered lost to time, since it was only sold to large corporations – for a massive almost 8000 dollar price tag – who obviously didn’t care about software preservation. There are no original disks left, but a recent “warez” release has made the software available once again. As always, pirates save the day. ⌘ Read more
The Macintosh was intended to be different in many ways. One of them was its file system, which was designed for each file to consist of two forks, one a regular data fork as in normal file systems, the other a structured database of resources, the resource fork. Resources came to be used to store a lot of standard structured data, such as the specifications for and contents of alerts and dialogs, menus, collections of text strings, keyboard ... ⌘ Read more
In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs. Today, the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener. ... ⌘ Read more
All that to say, I find that NetBSDs philosophy aligns with mine. The OS is small and cozy, and compared to many minimal Linux distributions, I found it faster to setup. Supported hardware is automatically picked up, for my Thinkpad T480s almost everything (except the trackpad issue I solved above) worked out of the box, and it comes with a minimal window manager and display manager to get you started. It is simple and minimal but with sane ... ⌘ Read more
This document provides information about the NanoBSD tools, which can be used to create FreeBSD system images for embedded applications, suitable for use on a USB key, memory card or other mass storage media. It can be used to build specialized install images, designed for easy installation and maintenance of systems commonly called “computer appliances”. Computer appliances have their hardware and software bundled in the product, which means all applications are pre-installed. The a ... ⌘ Read more
Well, this sure is something to wake up to: a massive worldwide outage of computer systems due to a problem with CrowdStrike software. Payment systems, airlines, hospitals, governments, TV stations – pretty much anything or anyone using computers could be dealing with bluescreens, bootloops, and similar issues today. Open-heart surgeries had to be stopped mid-surgery, planes can’t take off, people can’t b ... ⌘ Read more
It’s a bit of a Linux news day today – it happens – but this one is good news we can all be happy about. After earning a bad reputation for mishandling its Linux graphics drivers for years, almost decades, NVIDIA has been turning the ship around these past two years, and today they made a major announcement: from here on out, the open source NVIDIA kernel modules will be the default for all re ... ⌘ Read more
Not too long ago it seemed like Linux support for the new ARM laptops running the Snapdragon X Pro and Elite processors was going to be pretty good – Qualcomm seemed to really be stepping up its game, and detailed in a blog post exactly what they were doing to make Linux a first-tier operating system on their new, fancy laptop chips. Now that the devices are in people’s hand, though, it seems all is not so rosy in this ... ⌘ Read more
Ly is a lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and BSD. ↫ Ly GitHub page That’s it. That’s the description. I’ve been wanting to take a stab at running a full CLI/TUI environment for a while, see just how far I can get in my computing life (excluding games) running nothing but a few tiled terminal emulators running various TUI apps for email, Mastodon, browsing, and so on. I’m not sure I’d be particularly happy with it – I’m a GUI user through and through – but l ... ⌘ Read more
UKIs can run on UEFI systems and simplify the distribution of small kernel images. For example, they simplify network booting with iPXE. UKIs make rootfs and kernels composable, making it possible to derive a rootfs for multiple kernel versions with one file for each pair. A Unified Kernel Image (UKI) is a combination of a UEFI boot stub program, a Linux kernel image, an initramfs, and further resources in a single UEFI PE file (device tree, cpu µcode, splash screen, secure boot sig/key, … ... ⌘ Read more
In this article, I look inside a chip in the IBM 3274 Control Unit.1 But before I discuss the chip, I need to give some background on mainframes. ↫ Ken Shirriff Whenever we talk about mainframes, I am obligated to link to the story of an 18 year old buying a mainframe, while still living at his parents. One of the greatest presentations of all time. ⌘ Read more
We’ve been talking a lot about sleazy ways in which the online advertising industry is conspiring with browser makers – who also happen to be in the online advertising industry – to weaken privacy features so they can still track you and the ads they serve you, but with “privacy”. They’re trying really hard to ma ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve long been warning about the dangers of relying on just one browser as the bullwark against the onslaught of Chrome, Chrome skins, and Safari. With Firefox’ user numbers rapidly declining, now stuck at a mere 2% or so – and even less on mobile – and regulatory pressure possibly ending the Google-Mozilla deal with makes up roughly 80% ... ⌘ Read more
Built around the new Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture with some fundamental improvements to both graphics and AI performance, the Ryzen AI 300 series, code-named Strix Point, is set to deliver improvements in several areas. The Ryzen AI 300 series looks set to add another footnote in the march towards the AI PC with its mobile SoC featuring ... ⌘ Read more
I decided to document my journey of writing an OS in Nim. Why Nim? It’s one of the few languages that allow low-level systems programming with deterministic memory management (garbage collector is optional) with destructors and move semantics. It’s also statically typed, which provides greater type safety. It also supports inline assembly, which is a must for OS development. Other options include C, C++, Rust, and Zig. They’re great languages, but I chose Nim for its s ... ⌘ Read more
It’s time for Google being Google, this time by using an undocumented APIs to track resource usage when using Chrome. When visiting a \\*.google.com domain, the Google site can use the API to query the real-time CPU, GPU, and memory usage of your browser, as well as info about the processor you’re using, so that whatever ser ... ⌘ Read more*
About a month ago, Cameron Kaiser first introduced us to the Canon Cat, a computer designed by Jeff Raskin, but abandoned within six months by Canon, who had no idea what to do with it. In his second article on the Cat, Kaiser dives much deeper into the software and operating system of the Cat, even going so far as to become the first person to write software for it. One of the most surprising as ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has again quietly updated its Validation OS ISOs. In case you are not familiar with it, Validation OS is an official lightweight variant of Windows and it is designed for hardware vendors to test, validate and repair hardware defects. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin I had no idea this variant of Windows existed, but it kind of makes sense when you think about it ... ⌘ Read more
The corporate branding, the new “AI-powered developer platform” slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as “GitHub”—the traditional website, what are to me the core features—simply isn’t Microsoft’s priority at this point in time. I know many talented people at GitHub who care, but the company’s priorities just don’t seem to value what I value about the service. This isn’t an anti-AI statement so much as a recognition that the tool ... ⌘ Read more
The most fascinating time for Windows NT were its first few years on the market, when the brand new operating system supported a wide variety of architectures, from default x86, all the way down to stuff like Alpha, MIPS, and exotic things like Intel i860, and even weirder stuff like Clipper (even a SPARC port was planned, but never released). One of the more conventional architectures that saw a Windows NT port – ... ⌘ Read more
This solution lets developers compile their Amiga API-based applications as Linux binaries. Once the features are implemented, tested and optimized using the runtime on Linux or Windows, developers re-compile their applications for their Amiga-like system of choice and perform final quality checking. Applications created with AxRuntime can be distributed to Linux or Windows communities, giving developers a mu ... ⌘ Read more
Back in August 2023, we previewed our work on an experimental version of Chrome browser for ChromeOS named Lacros. The original intention was to allow Chrome browser on Chromebooks to swiftly get the latest feature and security updates without needing a full OS update. As we refocus our efforts on achieving similar objectives with ChromeOS embracing portions of the ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve read this article several times now, and I’m still not entirely sure how to properly summarise the main points without leaving important details out. If you really boil it down to the very bare essentials, which packages get updates on which Ubuntu release is a confusing mess that most normal users will never be able to understand, potentially leaving them vulnerable to security flaws that have already been widely patched and are availab ... ⌘ Read more
In 2019, a startup called Nuvia came out of stealth mode. Nuvia was notable because its leadership included several notable chip architects, including one who used to work for Apple. Apple chips like the M1 drew recognition for landing in the same performance neighborhood as AMD and Intel’s offerings while offering better power efficiency. Nuvia had similar goals, aiming to create a power efficient core that could could surpass designs ... ⌘ Read more
For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen for the X Window System, specifically the pattern it uses as the background of the root window. This pattern is technically called a stipple. What you’re seeing is pretty important and came to symbolize a lot for me as a computer practitioner. ↫ Matt T. Proud The X bootup pattern is defin ... ⌘ Read more
Palestinians living abroad have accused Microsoft of closing their email accounts without warning – cutting them off from crucial online services. They say it has left them unable to access bank accounts and job offers – and stopped them using Skype, which Microsoft owns, to contact relatives in war-torn Gaza. Microsoft says they violated its terms of service – a claim they dispute. ↫ Mohamed Shalaby and Joe Tidy a ... ⌘ Read more
A global internet sweep that examined the websites and mobile apps of 642 traders has found that 75,7% of them employed at least one dark pattern, and 66,8% of them employed two or more dark patterns. Dark patterns are defined as practices commonly found in online user interfaces and that steer, deceive, coerce, or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests. ↫ International Consum ... ⌘ Read more
I try to keep tabs on a huge number of operating system projects out there – for obvious reasons – but long ago I learned that when it comes to the world of Amiga, it’s best to maintain distance and let any important news find its way out of the Amiga bubble, lest one loses their sanity. Keeping up with the Amiga world requires following every nook and cranny of various forums and websites with different allegiances to diff ... ⌘ Read more
I love a good bug hunting story, and this one is right up there as a great one. Way back in 2018, Doug Brown discovered that after installing Ubuntu MATE 18.04, if he launched Firefox from the icon in the default panel arrangement to install Chrome from the official Chrome website, the process was broken. After downloading the .deb and double-clicking it, GDebi would appear, but after clickin ... ⌘ Read more
Android, like many other operating systems, uses the open-source Linux kernel. There are several different types of Linux kernel releases, but the type that’s most important to Android is the long-term support (LTS) one, as they’re updated regularly with important bug fixes and security patches. Starting in 2017, the support lifetime of LTS releases of Linux was extended from t ... ⌘ Read more
Among them, Byron Jourdan, Senior Director, Product Management of Mozilla, under the Reddit username ComprehensiveDoor643 revealed that Mozilla plans to support Firefox on Windows 7 for longer. When asked separately about whether it also included Windows 8 and 8.1 too, Jourdan added that it was certainly the plan, though for how long the extended support would last was still undecided. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin Excellent move by Mozilla. ... ⌘ Read more
Most people are familiar with GRUB, a powerful, flexible, fully-featured bootloader that is used on multiple architectures (x86\\_64, aarch64, ppc64le OpenFirmware). Although GRUB is quite versatile and capable, its features create complexity that is difficult to maintain, and that both duplicate and lag behind the Linux kernel while also creating numerous security holes. On the other hand, the Linux kernel, which has a large develope ... ⌘ Read more_
Despite being live since 1997, OSNews has had fairly few redesigns in the grand scheme of things. If my memory serves me correctly, we’ve had a grand total of 6 designs, and we’re currently on version 6, introduced about 5 years ago because of unpleasant reasons. It’s now 2024, and for a variety of reasons, we’re looking to work towards version 7 of our almost 30 year old website, and we need help. I have a very clear idea of what I want OSNews ... ⌘ Read more
Graham’s TWM page has been around for like two decades or so and still isn’t even remotely as old as TWM itself, and in 2021 they published an updated version with even more information, tips, and tricks for TWM. The Tab Window Manager finds its origins in the lat 1980s, and has been the default window manager for the X Windowing System for a long time, now, too. Yet, few people know it exists – how many people even kn ... ⌘ Read more
The goal is to be able to drag an icon from a background window without immediately raising that window and obscuring the drop target window when using the click-to-focus mode. This is a barebones description of what needs to happen. It assumes familiarity with code, protocols, etc. as needed. ↫ Quod Video The articles describes how to get there using both X and Wayla ... ⌘ Read more
If there was ever a “will they, won’t they?” love story in mobile computing, it’s definitely Google’s on and off again relationship with Android’s desktop mode. There have been countless hints, efforts, and code pertaining to the mythical desktop mode for Android, but so far, Google has never flipped the switch and made it available. It’s 2024, Android 15 development is in full swing, and it seems Google and Android’s deskt ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve just confirmed with, well, myself, that comment editing on OSNews finally works again. We’re finally free. Our trying times are behind us, and we can begin to rebuild. Stay safe out there, and be kind to each other. ⌘ Read more
To evolve Fuchsia beyond smart home devices, Google has been working on projects such as Starnix to run unmodified Linux binaries on Fuchsia devices. In addition, since late April of this year, Google has been working on a new project called “microfuchsia” that aims to make Fuchsia bootable on existing devices via virtualization. Microfuchsia, according to Google, is a Fuch ... ⌘ Read more
A few weeks ago, I broke the news that Mozilla had removed several anti-censorship Firefox extensions from its store in Russia, and a few days later I also broke the news they reversed course on their decision and reinstated the extensions. Perhaps not worthy of a beauty prize, as a Dutch saying goes, but at least the turnaround time was short, and they did the right ... ⌘ Read more
We talked about Psion last week, and we’re talking about Psion again this week. This time, Kian Ryan highlights a very important capability of Psion’s devices, a capability that’s entirely absent from today’s mobile devices: a built-in IDE and dedicated programming language so you can write code and build applications, including ones with a graphical user interface, right on the device. All Psion devices could run OPL, either preinstalled on the device or via ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve been working on a bunch of small projects involving microcontrollers. Currently a lot of them are based around the Raspberry Pi Pico boards because I like the development experience of those a lot. They have a decent SDK and cheap hardware to get started and the debugger works with gdb/openocd so it just integrates in all IDEs that support that. One of my current projects is making a fancy hardware controller for a bunch of video equipment I use. The main things ... ⌘ Read more
David Rosenthal, one of the primary contributors to the X Windowing System, has published an awesome blog post about the recent 40 year anniversary of X, full of details about the early days of X development, as well as the limitations they had to deal with, the choices they had to make, and the environment in which they were constrained. Once at Sun I realized that it was more important for the company that the Uni ... ⌘ Read more
It seems the dislike for machine learning runs deep. In a blog post, Cloudflare has announced that blocking machine learning scrapers is so popular, they decided to just add a feature to the Cloudflare dashboard that will block all machine learning scrapers with a single click. We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially th ... ⌘ Read more
The article’s from 2021, but I think it’s still worth discussing. A hard reality of C and C++ software development on Windows is that there has never been a good, native C or C++ standard library implementation for the platform. A standard library should abstract over the underlying host facilities in order to ease portable software development. On Windows, C and C++ is so poorly hooked up to operating system interfaces that most portab ... ⌘ Read more
Another month, another report from the Redox team. The Rust-based operating system saw another active month, including getting a whole bunch of new funding deals for specific features, such as adding UNIX-style signals to Redox, as well as the further development of Termion, a Redox project that is “a pure Rust, bindless library for low-level handling, manipulating and reading information about term ... ⌘ Read more
The impact printer was a mainstay of the early desktop computing era. Also called “dot matrix printers,” these printers could print low-resolution yet very readable text on a page, and do so quickly and at a low price point. But these printers are a relic of the past; in 2024, you might find them printing invoices or shipping labels, although more frequently these use cases have been replaced by other types of printers such as thermal printers and laser prin ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Defender is the endpoint security solution preinstalled on every Windows machine since Windows 7. It’s a fairly complex piece of software, addressing both EDR and EPP use cases. As such, Microsoft markets two different products. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud based endpoint security solution that combines sensor capabilities with the advantages of a cloud processing. Microsoft Defende ... ⌘ Read more
R9 is a work-in-progress effort to build a Plan 9 kernel to Rust. It was started a couple years back by the maintainers of the Harvey OS distribution of Plan 9, who threw in the towel after “loss of traction”. R9 is a reimplementation of the plan9 kernel in Rust. It is not only inspired by but in many ways derived from the original Plan 9 source code. ↫ R9OS GitHub page For now, the project is obviously mostly focused on running in virtual machines, specifically Qemu, in which it can be run ... ⌘ Read more
Once upon a time, the IBM PC was released. In the IBM PC BIOS, you could enter characters that weren’t present on the keyboard by holding the Alt key and typing the decimal value on the numeric keypad. For example, you could enter ñ by holding Alt and typing Numpad1 Numpad6 Numpad4, then releasing the Alt key. ↫ Raymond Chen ... ⌘ Read more
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act is the gift that keeps on giving. This time, it’s Facebook’s turn to be slapped on the fingers with a ruler – a metric ruler, of course – because of its malicious compliance with the DMA. Today, the Commission has informed Meta of its preliminary findings that its “pay or consent” advertising model fails to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). In the Commiss ... ⌘ Read more
Well, it seems we’ve got a better understanding now of why Andreas Kling decided to leave the SerenityOS project to focus entirely on Ladybird, the web browser that grew out of his hobby operating system. They’ve got some big plans for where to take Ladybird, and I’m saying “they” because it’s being backed by a big name. They’ve set up a fancy new website for the project, which makes it ... ⌘ Read more
In this writeup we provide a summary of technical information crucial to evaulate the exploitability and impact of memory safety problems in IBM i programs. As administrators and developers of IBM i aren’t supposed to work “below MI level” this kind of information is not officially documented by the vendor. The information presented here is thus based on already published reverse engineering results, and our own findings uncovered using IBM’s System Sertice Tools (SST) and th ... ⌘ Read more
On the brink of insanity, my tattered mind unable to comprehend the twisted interplay of millennia of arcane programmer-time and the ragged screech of madness, I reached into the Mass and steeled myself to the ground lest I be pulled in, and found my magnum opus. Booting Linux off of a Google Drive root. ↫ Ersei That’s not… You shouldn’t… Why would… ⌘ Read more
The web browser Vivaldi is taking a firm stance against including machine learning tools to its browser. So, as we have seen, LLMs are essentially confident-sounding lying machines with a penchant to occasionally disclose private data or plagiarise existing work. While they do this, they also use vast amounts of energy and are happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them which is a prob ... ⌘ Read more
Straight from the arcade world, the Neo Geo was, without a doubt, the most expensive hardware of the 4th generation. This begs the question: how capable was it and how did it compare with the rest? In this entry, we’ll take a look at the result of one company (SNK) setting budget restrictions aside and shipping a product meant to please both arcade owners and rich households. ↫ Rodrigo Copetti Rich households, indeed. Back in the ’90s, when Ninten ... ⌘ Read more