ArcaOS 5.0.7 includes refreshed driver content, updated kernel and included software, as well as installation boot fixes since 5.0.6 was released in 2020. If you have experienced difficulty installing previous releases of ArcaOS on your hardware, 5.0.7 may address your issue(s). If installing from USB stick, the image may be created using any major operating system at hand (Windows, Linux, MacOS, and of course, OS/2, eComStation, and ArcaOS). Once built, the USB stick can be inserted i ... ⌘ Read more
ArcaOS 5.0.7 includes refreshed driver content, updated kernel and included software, as well as installation boot fixes since 5.0.6 was released in 2020. If you have experienced difficulty installing previous releases of ArcaOS on your hardware, 5.0.7 may address your issue(s). If installing from USB stick, the image may be created using any major operating system at hand (Windows, Linux, MacOS, and of course, OS/2, eComStation, and ArcaOS). Once built, the USB stick can be inserted i ... ⌘ Read more
In an extensive paywalled report based on interviews and purported internal Apple documents, The Information revealed that Tim Cook personally forged a five-year agreement with the Chinese government during a series of in-person visits to the country in 2016. The need to push for a closer alliance with the Chinese government reportedly came from a number of Apple executives who were ... ⌘ Read more
We are very excited to introduce to all of you the redesigned Notepad for Windows 11, which includes a number of changes we think the community will enjoy! First, you will notice a completely updated UI that aligns with the new visual design of Windows 11, including rounded corners, Mica, and more. We know how important Notepad is to so many of your daily workflows, so we designed this ... ⌘ Read more
Another 6 months have passed and we are proud to announce the release of our 2021.10 snapshot. The images are available at the usual place. As usual we have automatically received all updates that have been integrated into illumos-gate. The new images are interesting for people with newer hardware that hasn’t been supported in the past. There is no necessity to re-install from newer images as OpenIndiana Hipster is a rolling release and will bring all up ... ⌘ Read more
I won’t bury the lede, by the end of this article you should be able to write your name in crazy diacritics like this: Ḡ͓̟̟r̬e̱̬͔͑g̰ͮ̃͛ ̇̅T̆a̐̑͢ṫ̀ǔ̓͟m̮̩̠̟. This article is part of the Unicode and i18n series motivated by my work with internationalization in Firefox and the Unicode ICU4X sub-committee. There are three motivations behind linking to this article. First, it’s an deep technical look at how Unicode handles complex diacritics, w ... ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD 12.3 has been released. As a true point release, there’s no major new features or massive updates in here – there’s updated network drivers, kernel bug fixes, and so on. The full release notes have all the details. ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has been courting much controversy in Windows 11 by making it difficult to set your default browser to anything but Edge. After much outcry and a seeming change in strategy, Microsoft appears to have come round in the latest Windows 11 Insider Builds, and are now making it relatively easier to set the default browser to your own preference. This was an untenable situation, and I’m gl ... ⌘ Read more
Genode 21.11 puts the spotlight on device drivers. Interactive Genode scenarios come to the Pinephone, hardware-accelerated graphics becomes available on Intel Gen9+ and Vivante GPUs, and Xilnx Zynq receives new love. Excellent progress, as always from the Genode team. ⌘ Read more
Someone or multiple people are blasting “antiwork” manifestos to receipt printers at businesses around the world, according to people who claim to have seen the printed manifesto, dozens of posts on Reddit, and a cybersecurity company that is analyzing network traffic to insecure printers. An intersection between technology and social issues – and an inventive and effe ... ⌘ Read more
Thanks in large part to the hard work by X512 and everyone developing on Haiku, our nightly RISCV64 images are now functional. RISC-V marks Haiku’s first functional non-Intel/x86 port! This is still crazy to me. This port has taken relatively little time, yet it marks a major milestone in Haiku’s history. ⌘ Read more
This is what I think we should shoot for in KDE: software that is simple by default so it can work for 1-dot users, but powerful when needed via expansive customization, so that it can appeal all the way to the 4-dot users–which includes many KDE developers. This is currently a strength of KDE software, and it won’t be going away! Essentially we need to fully e ... ⌘ Read more
The Federal Trade Commission today sued to block U.S. chip supplier Nvidia Corp.’s $40 billion acquisition of U.K. chip design provider Arm Ltd. Semiconductor chips power the computers and technologies that are essential to our modern economy and society. The proposed vertical deal would give one of the largest chip companies control over the computing technology and designs that rival firms rely on to develop their own competing chips. The FTC’s c ... ⌘ Read more
Oxide announced Hubris, their microkernel OS for embedded systems, and Humility the debugger for it. As time went on in early 2020 and we found ourselves increasingly forcing existing systems out of the comfort of their design centers, we wondered: was our assumption of using an existing system wrong? Should we in fact be exploring our own de novo operating system? Instead of having an operating system that knows how to dynamically create tasks at run-time (itself a hallmark of ... ⌘ Read more
I implemented RadeonGfx driver server mode and now it is possible to run multiple processes that use 3D acceleration. Because of GFX ring reset hack, command buffer scheduling is limited and only one command buffer can be executed at moment of time. That’s right – that’s X512, the amazing developer who ported Haiku to RISC-V, now working on bringing initial 3D acceleration to Haiku. There’s a long road ahead for this to become a default, working part o ... ⌘ Read more
So. What is DESQview/X? Many people, in the current day and age, may have never even heard of this system from the mid-1990s. Its predecessor, DESQview (without the “/X”) which was first released in 1985, was a multi-tasking, windowing system for DOS. It allowed someone, with very modest PC hardware, to run multiple text-mode DOS applications at the same time. With overlapping, resizable windows. Pretty darned cool. ... ⌘ Read more
ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans dependency on Google web services. It also features some tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency (almost all of which require manual activation or enabling). ungoogled-chromium retains the default Chromium experience as closely as possible. Unlike other Chromium forks that have their own visions of a web browser, ungoogled-chromium is essentiall ... ⌘ Read more
Supposedly today we have a lot of browsers to choose from – Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. Having choices is a good thing, right? Nobody wants to relive the time of almost complete Internet Explorer domination again. Unfortunately our choices are significantly fewer than they seem to be at first glance, as Chrome and Safari (thanks to the iPhone) totally dominate the browser landscape in terms of usage and almost all br ... ⌘ Read more
Running Windows 3.1 in VMware (or seemingly, QEMU, but it’s not yet tested), but annoyed by having to grab and ungrab the cursor manually? Wish you could just move the cursor in and out like a modern OS (one with USB tablet support or VMware Tools drivers), with no Ctrl+Alt dancing? Or want to control your cursor at all under the ESXi web UI? (It doesn’t do relative input.) With this driver, now you can. It implements the interface that VMware uses (th ... ⌘ Read more
A coalition of EU software and cloud businesses joined Nextcloud GmbH in respect of their formal complaint to the European Commission about Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior in respect of its OneDrive (cloud) offering. In a repeat from earlier monopolistic actions, Microsoft is bundling its OneDrive, Teams and other services with Windows ... ⌘ Read more
When I talk about things involving the history of Unix, I often wind up mentioning V7, also known as Seventh Edition of Research Unix from Bell Labs (for a recent example, in my entry on when Unix got stack size limits). If you’re relatively new to the history of Unix, you might wonder why V7 keeps coming up so often. There are a number of reasons that V7 matters so much both for the history of Unix and for what is what we think of as being ‘Unix’ and the Unix way. Th ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is introducing a new feature in Edge allowing customers to pay for e-commerce transactions in installments – and not everybody is happy. The ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL) feature is, controversially, integrated at the browser level, thanks to a partnership with third-party payments provider Zip, formerly QuadPay. The option is similar to tho ... ⌘ Read more
Apple, Google, Facebook and other tech companies may be forced into finding a solution that allows users to connect across the various messaging platforms. Currently, each service has its own way of handling communication that is not compatible with others, placing a burden upon the user when there is a need to reach someone using a different platform or service. A universal communication ... ⌘ Read more
Modern languages such as Go, Julia and Rust don’t need complex garbage collectors like the ones use by Java C#. But why? To explain why, we need to get into how garbage collectors work and how different languages allocate memory in different ways. However, we will start by looking at why Java in particular needs such a complex garbage collector. Good info on how Go deals with memory versus how Java, mainly, handles memory. The most interesting start of a rabbit ... ⌘ Read more
The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much less desirable, one might expect that there would have been some press releases touting the advantages of the new technology, articles describing the whys and wherefores, but… nope. There is nothing. And so begins a deep dive into th ... ⌘ Read more
Airyx OS has seen its first beta release, with a quite a few big improvements. • Default application bundles: Firefox, Terminal, and Kate• A new AppKit-based ObjectiveC installer (Install airyxOS.app)• Java SDK 17.0.1+12• Updated to FreeBSD 12.3RC base OS and kernel• Improvements to AppKit including better support of color catalogs and color lists, more Mac-like default colors, support for pop-up menus, fixed scrollbar icons, improved font handling, system k ... ⌘ Read more
Apple today filed a lawsuit against NSO Group and its parent company to hold it accountable for the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. The complaint provides new information on how NSO Group infected victims’ devices with its Pegasus spyware. To prevent further abuse and ... ⌘ Read more
The “desktop-engine” Arcan has put out a new release after close to a year of development, continuing its current focus on improving network transparency. A recent and long post on Arcan as OS Design is also a worthwhile and interesting view into this fascinating project. ⌘ Read more
The current solutions involve packaging entire alternate runtimes in containerized environments. Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, Docker, and Steam: these all provide an app packaging mechanism that replaces most or all of the system’s runtime libraries, and they now all use containerization to accomplish this. Flatpak calls itself “the future of application distribution”. I am not a fan. I’m going to outline here some of the technical, security and usability problems with Flat ... ⌘ Read more
Let’s say you got your filthy hands on an ISO of Red Star OS Desktop 3.0 (like, 5 years ago but you forgot about it). The obvious next step is to install it on your main computer and give it access to the outside so it can spread love and goodness. Just kidding, install that motherfucker in a virtual machine (VirtualBox, VMware, etc), just because. These articles looking at North Korea’s Red Star OS pop up every few years, and they’re always a fun read. ⌘ Read more
If you’ve been putting off watching Netflix’s Arcane because you don’t play League of Legends, stop that right now. Friends, you’re missing out on some truly incredible animation. The first TV series from Riot Games and French animation studio Fortiche, created by Christian Linke and Alex Yee, Arcane landed on Netflix on N ... ⌘ Read more
Flux is an independent online news source that covers politics, religion, philosophy, and technology, and the way that they intersect. I sat down with its founder, and talked about the state of the operating system world in 1997 when I started OSNews, and what has changed since then, both in the computing realm and in the political milieu that pervades our lives. We ... ⌘ Read more
Last week, we reported that MediaTek is planning to build a chipset for Windows on ARM. As it turns out, the Windows on ARM chipset space could be even hotter than that, because there’s a reason that we’ve only seen Qualcomm SoCs in ARM PCs so far. Qualcomm actually has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Windows on ARM, and speaking with people familiar with it, we’ve learned that the de ... ⌘ Read more
Nreal’s Light sunglasses, which Verizon will start selling later this month, are one of only a few consumer-focused augmented reality headsets. They’re an impressive technical feat: small for an AR or VR product, comparatively affordable at $599, and capable of full-fledged mixed reality that projects images into real space, not just a flat heads-up overlay like the North Focals. Unfortunately, Nreal’s software doesn’ ... ⌘ Read more
Based on several posts on Twitter, it seems that Tesla owners around the world are reporting not being able to connect their phone to their vehicle or, in some cases, not even being able to start the car. Tesla owners should be used to being beta testers. ⌘ Read more
The Self Service Repair program will give customers who are comfortable with the idea of completing their own repairs access to Apple genuine parts, tools, and manuals, starting with the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups. The scheme will be introduced in phases, adding more repairs and supported devices over time. This is a major win for right-to-repair, and I’m very happy Aplpe c ... ⌘ Read more
IBM has announced it has cleared a major hurdle in its effort to make quantum computing useful: it now has a quantum processor, called Eagle, with 127 functional qubits. This makes it the first company to clear the 100-qubit mark, a milestone that’s interesting because the interactions of that many qubits can’t be simulated using today’s classical computing hardware and algorithms. But what may be more significant is t ... ⌘ Read more
Well, I do all of my projects in Rust now. Even little scripts I’d usually write in Python I often find myself grabbing Rust for. I’m comfortable with using Rust for pretty much any project at this point, that I decided that for a long-ish term stream project (ultimately a snapshot fuzzer for NT), I would want to do this in Rust. The very first thought that comes to mind is to just build a MIPS executable from Rust, and just… run it. Well, that would be great, but ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has already made it more difficult to switch default browsers in Windows 11, and now the company is going a step further by blocking apps like EdgeDeflector. Third-party apps like EdgeDeflector and even Firefox have offered workarounds to Microsoft forcing people to use Edge in Start menu search results, even if their default browser is not Edge. Microsoft has been forcing Windows 10 and ... ⌘ Read more
The third quarter of 2021 was quite active in lots of different areas, so the report covers a bunch of interesting work including but not limited to boot performance, compile-time analysis, hole-punching support, various drivers, ZFS raidz expansion, an update to the sound mixer, and many more. FreeBSD’s status reports are a great way to keep up to speed with the project’s progress. ⌘ Read more
This week one of the more interesting WSL mentions is proof-of-concept work on using systemd within Windows Subsystem for Linux. Well known Ubuntu developers Didier Roche and Jean Baptiste Lallement of Canonical’s desktop team mentioned among their WSL work recently was “PoC of systemd on WSL at startup of an instance.“ I’m sure nobody will be unhappy with systemd making its way to WSL. ⌘ Read more
Welcome to .NET 6. Today’s release is the result of just over a year’s worth of effort by the .NET Team and community. C# 10 and F# 6 deliver language improvements that make your code simpler and better. There are massive gains in performance, which we’ve seen dropping the cost of hosting cloud services at Microsoft. .NET 6 is the first release that natively supports Apple Silicon (Arm64) and has also been improved for Windows Arm64. We built a new dynamic profile-guided optimization (PGO) sy ... ⌘ Read more
MuditaOS has been released as open source. This mobile operating system is designed specifically for the Mudita Pure e-ink mobile phone, and is based on FreeRTOS. Developing our mobile operating system has been a big challenge in the process of creating Mudita Pure. We came up with a beautifully designed E Ink mobile OS and open-sourced it to fully meet our users’ desire for quality and transparency. This is an interest ... ⌘ Read more
The headline improvement is one that was already trailed by Ville in his recent Sandboxing blog post. From now on, any app that defines an application profile will be automatically sandboxed. This is currently an opt-in process; any app that isn’t updated in this way will still run outside the sandbox. As a user this means you will start to see some third party apps bring up the sandboxing dialogue on first run. You should already be familiar with this from 4.2.0, in ... ⌘ Read more
Alphabet unit Google lost an appeal against a 2.42-billion-euro ($2.8-billion) antitrust decision on Wednesday, a major win for Europe’s competition chief in the first of three court rulings central to the EU push to regulate big tech. Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager fined the world’s most popular internet search engine in 2017 over the use of its own price comparison shopping service ... ⌘ Read more
Here, I will try to present another huge benefit of using Flutter desktop: the ability to build an app with a user interface that matches the underlying platform’s design standards. As you can see, Shortcut Keeper is built to be an adaptive app for desktops, boasting a different UI design for macOS and Windows, while using a single codebase. This has always been the holy grail of c ... ⌘ Read more
Since AMD’s relaunch into high-performance x86 processor design, one of the fundamental targets for the company was to be a competitive force in the data center. By having a competitive product that customers could trust, the goal has always been to target what the customer wants, and subsequently grow market share and revenue. Since the launch of 3rd Generation EPYC, AMD is growing ... ⌘ Read more
While at the Linux Foundation Members Summit in Napa, California, I was bemused to find that an open-source savvy intellectual property attorney had never heard of SCO vs. IBM. You know, the lawsuit that at one time threatened to end Linux in the cradle? Well, at least some people thought so anyway. More fool they. But now, after SCO went bankrupt; court after court dismissing SCO’s crazy copyright claims; and closing in on 20-y ... ⌘ Read more
LXQt, the lightweight desktop environment based on Qt, has hit its 1.0.0 release, with tons of changes and improvements. Going through the changelog, we can see it’s based on the final LTS release of Qt 5, Qt 5.15, and sports new features across all of its components. The file manager has seen a lot of work, there’s now a do-not-disturb mode, there’s the usual Wayland improvements, and a lot more. ⌘ Read more
System76’s Pop!\\_OS Linux distribution already has their own “COSMIC” desktop that is based on GNOME, but moving ahead they are working on their own Rust-written desktop that is not based on GNOME or any existing desktop environment. Stemming from a Reddit discussion over the possibility of seeing a KDE flavor of Pop!\\_OS, it was brought up by one of their own en ... ⌘ Read more
So is the metaverse the next big advance that will revolutionize the way we all connect with each other? Is it just a repackaging of existing technologies into a new catch-all concept? Or is it just the latest buzzword marketing term? The answer to that depends on what you mean by “metaverse”. If there’s ever been a buzzword that truly gets under my skin, it’s this one. It’s clearly manufactured and groomed by corporations, Facebook especially, t ... ⌘ Read more
The Soviet-made 1801VM2 CPU (a binary-compatible implementation of the PDP11 instruction set and QBUS interface) was developed in 1982. The 1801VM2 is a further development of the earlier 1801VM1 doubling the original 5MHz clock speed. From a constructive standpoint this CPU is a completely independent development. There’s a wealth of interesting computer technology in the former USSR, and it’s great to see more of it make its way online. ⌘ Read more
Overall though, it’s no denying that Intel is now in the thick of it, or if I were to argue, the market leader. The nuances of the hybrid architecture are still nascent, so it will take time to discover where benefits will come, especially when we get to the laptop variants of Alder Lake. At a retail price of around $650, the Core i9-12900K ends up being comp ... ⌘ Read more
While playing around with the GUI on OpenVMS I was looking for CDE documentation and I found out CDE is still being developed and can be installed on modern linux. This quick post shows you how to install CDE on Debian 10 and includes a bit on compiling GENERIC TETRIS, the same program I installed on OpenVMS. I will forever stand by my article from 14 years ago and you can put on my ... ⌘ Read more
To capture a composite video signal and display it on my computer’s output, I need to use an upscaler that converts to an HDMI signal, then an HDMI capture device which in turn communicates with my PC over USB. Then, I can overlay my stupid face over it and send it to Twitch or something. But what if it was 1984? Of course, Twitch wouldn’t exist, nor would HDMI. So what’s the next best thing? Ah, the MSX. Most people focus on how popular it was in Japan, but t ... ⌘ Read more
A common request is your need for Microsoft Edge to span the breadth of operating systems in your environment. Last October, we made Microsoft Edge available on Linux in preview channels (Dev and Beta channels) and today, the browser is generally available for Linux via the stable channel. This milestone officially rounds out the full complement of major platform ... ⌘ Read more
Today we celebrate the third birthday of SerenityOS, counting from the first commit in the git repository, on October 10, 2018. Previous birthdays: 1st, 2nd. What follows is a list of interesting events from the past year, mixed with random development screenshots and also reflections from other developers in the SerenityOS community. SerenityOS is simply a great project, with a good mindset, good people, and lots and lots of talent. These birthday posts are a great way to ... ⌘ Read more
This release comes with improved support for user sessions on high resolution displays, new TWin styles (SUSE2 and DeKorator), some other new applications, improvements to ffmpeg support and video support in Kopete, a revamped weather bar for Konqueror, a working KNemo backend and various minor improvements and fixes to several long standing annoying bugs and crashes. It also adds support for Debian Bullseye, Ubuntu Impish, Fedora 34 and ... ⌘ Read more
Some time ago, I thought it would be useful to understand exactly what is the difference between CD-ROMs recorded in the old High Sierra format versus the ISO 9660 standard. This was in part spurred by the fact that I have a number of CD-ROMs/images that use the High Sierra format (Microsoft Programmer’s Library, some IBM Developer Connection issues, OS/2 Warp 4, and more) that both macOS and Windows 10 refuse to mount. The other part of my motivation was the usual insatiable cur ... ⌘ Read more
I was wondering what would be the ultimate upgrade for my 386 motherboard. It has a 386 CPU soldered-in, an unpopulated 386 PGA socket and a socket for either 387 FPU or 486 PGA or (might take a Weitek as well – not quite sure) and even might have a soldered-in 486SX PQFP. Plenty of options… But how about hacking a Pentium in? Nothing about this makes any sense, and yet, it’s just plain awesome. ⌘ Read more
As you’d expect, Linux 5.15 includes an impressive itinerary of improvements. These range from small fixes at lower levers through to major restructuring of core functionality. The following roundup highlights the additions that caught my interest/eye but is by no means an exhaustive run-through. The biggest new feature is the new NTFS driver, but there’s a lot more in this release, such as an in-kernel driver for SMB, and more Apple M1 support, to name a few. ⌘ Read more
Strange as it may seem to older generations of computer users who grew up maintaining an elaborate collection of nested subfolders, thanks to powerful search functions now being the default in operating systems, as well as the way phones and tablets obfuscate their file structure, and cloud storage, high school graduates don’t see their hard drives the same way. As anyone who has had to sift through a r ... ⌘ Read more
Ars Technica: If you don’t want to (or can’t) run Windows 11 on your PC, the good news is that Microsoft will be providing at least a few app updates to Windows 10 to keep it feeling useful. One of those app updates is Windows 11’s revamped Microsoft Store, which is now available to Windows 10 users in the Release Preview Insider channel. The new Microsoft St ... ⌘ Read more
In the brutal future of Frank Herbert’s Dune, computers are outlawed and high level computations are done by specially trained and bred humans called mentats. In Herbert’s world, there’s something elegant about old solutions to new problems. Good then that Oscar winning Dune screenwriter Eric Roth banged out the screenplay using the MS-DOS program Movie Master. Roth writes everything using the 30-year-old software. “I work on an old ... ⌘ Read more
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at his company’s Connect event that its new name will be Meta. “We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.” “To reflect who we are and what we hope to build,” he added. He said the name Facebook doesn’t fully encompass everything the company ... ⌘ Read more
There are over a quarter billion large screen devices running Android across tablets, foldables, and ChromeOS devices. In just the last 12 months we’ve seen nearly 100 million new Android tablet activations–a 20% year-over-year growth, while ChromeOS, now the fastest growing desktop platform, grew by 92%. We’ve also seen Foldable devices on the rise, with year on year growth of over 265%! All told, there are over 250 m ... ⌘ Read more
According to my sources, this new laptop is codenamed Tenjin and features a fully plastic exterior, a 1366×768 11.6-inch display, an Intel Celeron N4120 and up to 8GB RAM. This is a no-frills laptop designed to be as low-cost as possible, built for student-use in a classroom environment. I’m told the device features a full-sized key ... ⌘ Read more
Well, it’s almost here. It looks like Intel will take the ST crown, although MT is a bit of a different story, and might rely explicitly on the software being used or if the difference in performance is worth the price. The use of the hybrid architecture might be an early pain point, and it will be interesting to see if Thread Director remains resilient to the issues. The ... ⌘ Read more
Monterey feels of a piece with maintenance-mode macOS updates like El Capitan or Sierra or High Sierra—change the default wallpaper, and in day-to-day use you can easily forget that you’ve upgraded from Big Sur at all. It’s not that there aren’t any new features here—it’s just that improving any operating system as mature as macOS involves a lot of tinkering around the edges. But there are plenty of things to talk about in even the most minor of macOS releases, and Mont ... ⌘ Read more
On the CPU side, doubling up on the performance cores is an evident way to increase performance – the competition also does so with some of their designs. How Apple does it differently, is that it not only scaled the CPU cores, but everything surrounding them. It’s not just 4 additional performance cores, it’s a whole new performance cluster with its own L2. On the ... ⌘ Read more
There are many interesting things to discuss about Fuchsia. In this article, you will get a taste of how Fuchsia OS works through a deep dive into some of its core features. We’ll also run the Fuchsia emulator on our systems and try running some example components on it. A great resource if you’re considering getting started with Fuchsia. ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is reversing a decision to remove a key feature from its upcoming .NET 6 release, after a public outcry from the open source community. Microsoft angered the .NET open source community earlier this week by removing a key part of Hot Reload in the upcoming release of .NET 6, a feature that allows developers to modify source code while an app is running and immedia ... ⌘ Read more
Chimera is a Linux distribution with the following goals: – Built entirely with LLVM– FreeBSD-based userland– Binary packaging and a well designed source build system– Bootstrappable– Portable This project is still very early in its development, but it’s an interesting premise. It’s developed by Daniel Kolesa, who also contributes a lot to Void Linux, most notably the excellen ... ⌘ Read more
To help support the specific needs of developers offering subscriptions, starting on January 1, 2022, we’re decreasing the service fee for all subscriptions on Google Play from 30% to 15%, starting from day one. Regulatory pressure works. This is only a small step, but at least it’s progress. ⌘ Read more
Today, we are announcing the first preview of our Android apps experience into the Windows Insider Program. We are proud to deliver this experience with our partners – Amazon and Intel – to Beta Channel users in the United States on eligible devices running Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm platforms. I have my sincerest doubts about the true usefulness of running Android applications on Windows. They’ll always feel ... ⌘ Read more
In 2006, Sony unveiled the long-awaited ‘next generation’ video-game console, a shiny (albeit heavy) machine whose underlying hardware architecture continues the teachings of the Emotion Engine, that is, focus on vector processing to achieve power, even at the cost of complexity. Meanwhile, their new ‘super processor’, the Cell Broadband Engine, is conceived during a crisis of innovation and will have to keep up as trends for ... ⌘ Read more
In today’s era of hybrid cloud, there is an increased demand for flexible infrastructure, continuous availability, scalable and sustainable compute, enhanced security and data protection, and increased integration with open technologies. As businesses navigate these dynamic market conditions and IT infrastructure demands, they require an operating system they can rely on that can be optimized to adapt to these changing business needs. With the introduction of IBM AIX 7.3 Standard Editi ... ⌘ Read more
Surprisingly, it looks like Microsoft will not put an upgrade block on installations done on a device using Intel’s Pentium 4 661, which was released in 2006 and obviously doesn’t meet all Windows 11 requirements. As you can see in the above screenshot, Intel Pentium 4 661, which has only one core and 3.6Ghz of clock speed, is listed as a supported processor in the PC Health Check. That’s possibly ... ⌘ Read more
After successfully getting Mesa’s software-based Lavapipe Vulkan implementation building on Haiku last month along with related Mesa code for headless support, a developer independent of AMD has started work on porting the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” to Haiku. Haiku developer “X512” has been spending the past number of weeks so far trying to get the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver stack workin ... ⌘ Read more
After many leaks, official teases, and months of waiting, Google has finally given its latest Pixel phones a formal launch. The new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro are the latest high-end phones from the company that hasn’t traditionally been able to make much of a dent in the high-end phone market. Both are available for preorder starting today, October 19th, and will begin shipping on Oc ... ⌘ Read more
For the M1 Pro, Apple promises 70 percent better CPU performance and twice the graphics performance compared to the M1. While the basic architecture is still the same on the M1 Pro, Apple is upping the hardware here in a big way, with a 10-core CPU that offers eight performance cores and two efficiency cores, along with a 16-core GPU with 2,048 execut ... ⌘ Read more
First and technically most exciting, the new version enables the use of hardware-accelerated graphics on Intel GPUs, paving the ground for graphics-intensive applications and games. The GPU support is based on the combination of the Mesa library stack with our custom GPU multiplexer as featured in Genode 21.08. Note that this fresh new feature should best be regarded as experimental and be used with caution. Second, our port of the Chromium-based Falkon web browser has become able ... ⌘ Read more
More than a century after the artists of the Vienna Secession declared “to every age its art; to art its freedom”, the Austrian capital has found a new site for artistic expression free from censorship: the adults-only platform OnlyFans. Vienna’s tourism board has started an account on OnlyFans – the only social network that permits depictions of nudity – in protest against platforms’ ongo ... ⌘ Read more
25 years ago today, Matthias Ettrich sent an email to the de.comp.os.linux.misc newsgroup explaining a project he was working on. The latest and direct result of that email (plus a quarter of a century of relentless experimentation, development and innovation) has just landed in KDE’s repositories. This time around, Plasma renews its looks and, not only do you get a new wallpaper, but also a gust of fresh air from an updated theme: Breeze – Blu ... ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu 21.10 brings a wide variety of improvements, most notably on the desktop side switching to GNOME Shell 40 and offering many improvements there including some theme refinements. There are also many underlying improvements to enjoy with Ubuntu 21.10, like what gets us excited about kernel and compiler upgrades along with other notable package version bumps. Adding Wayland support for NVIDIA drivers is a big improvement, as is the addition of PipeWire. There’s also a big regressi ... ⌘ Read more
OpenBSD 7.0 has been released, and it seems a big focus for this release was improving ARM64 support, and adding support for RISC-V. There’s a long list or other improvements and fixes, too, of course. Downloads are where they always are. ⌘ Read more
Microsoft delivers the latest Windows security and user experiences updates monthly. Updates are modular meaning that, regardless of which update you currently have installed, you only need the most recent quality update to get your machine up to date. With the fast pace of Windows security and quality fixes, distributing this large amount of updated content takes up substantial bandwidth. Reducing this network transfer is crit ... ⌘ Read more
Shortly after Windows 11 launch, AMD and Microsoft jointly discovered that Windows 11 is poorly optimized for AMD Ryzen processors, which see significantly increased L3 cache latency, and the UEFI-CPPC2 (preferred cores mechanism) rendered not working. In our own testing, a Ryzen 7 2700X “Pinnacle Ridge” processor, which typically posts an L3 cache ... ⌘ Read more
6.0.1 is tagged and available. The major reason for this update is an expired Let’s Encrypt certificate that would cause problems when downloading dpkg binaries. A list of 6.0.1 commits is available. Not a whole lot going on in this release, but still a major bug fix. ⌘ Read more
The 6502 was the CPU in my first computer (an Apple II plus), as well as many other popular home computers of the late 1970s and 80s. It lived on well into the 1990s in game consoles and chess computers, mostly in its updated “65C02” CMOS version. Here’s a re-implementation of the 65C02 in an FPGA, in a pin-compatible format that lets you upgrade those old computers and games to 100 MHz clock rate! Interesting project. ⌘ Read more
Another month has passed, so time for another monthly update from the Haiku team. This time around, we get two for the price of one. First, the regular monthly activity report, where we can read that work on the ARM64 and RISC-V ports continues, and while these ports are nowhere near complete, they serve an important function both in discovering bugs and issues, as well as in getting Haiku ready for future architecture transitions. Tracker ... ⌘ Read more
In the mid-to-late 2000s, you either knew, or were, that kid in grade school. You know. The one who could put games on your graphing calculator. You may be surprised to learn that some of these people didn’t exist totally in a vacuum. There was in fact a thriving scene of hackers who had bent these calculators to their will, writing games, math software, and more generally hacking on the platform just for the sake of it. True ... ⌘ Read more
In the years leading up to that launch, we’ve uncovered signs of the Fuchsia team developing support for a variety of Google devices, including the Nest Hub Max, 2021’s second-gen Nest Hub, and more. Now, it seems, Google is ready to make its next steps more public, in a series of job listings posted this week, some of which reference a “Fuchsia Devices” ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft’s Xbox and Surface hardware may be getting easier to repair, according to a press release from shareholder advocacy nonprofit As You Sow. According to the announcement, Microsoft has agreed to evaluate and expand the repair options for its products “by the end of 2022.” The promises are a bit vague for now, but hopefully this will have a real-world impact. ⌘ Read more
Quickly create and run highly optimised desktop virtual machines for Linux, macOS and Windows; with just two commands. You decide what operating system you want to run and Quickemu will figure out the best way to do it for you. Excellent idea. ⌘ Read more
This is an introduction to getting IBM’s OS/360 operating system loaded and running on the Hercules emulator for the System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture systems. It assumes you have some familiarity with the 370, and with OS; in particular, you need to have some understanding of JCL, and of OS/360 (or later versions, like MVS or OS/390) usage and operation. It does not purport to be an introduction to the wor ... ⌘ Read more
For years now, Windows 10’s Windows Subsystem for Linux has been making life easier for developers, sysadmins, and hobbyists who have one foot in the Windows world and one foot in the Linux world. But WSL, handy as it is, has been hobbled by several things it could not do. Installing WSL has never been as easy as it should be—and getting graphical apps to work has historically been pos ... ⌘ Read more
On the competitive landscape, Ampere is carving out its niche for the moment, but what happens once AMD or Intel increase their core counts as well? A 50% increase in core counts for next-gen Genoa should be sufficient for AMD to catch up with the M128 in raw throughput, and technologies such as V-cache should make sure the HPC segment is fully covered as well, a segment Ampere appears to have no interes ... ⌘ Read more
This Atari 1040ST is still in use after 36 years! Frans Bos bought this Atari in 1985 to run his camp site (Camping Böhmerwald). He wrote his own software over the years to manage his camp site, as well as reservations and the registration of the guests. He really likes the speed of the machine compared to newer computers. And 6 months every year the machine is on day and night. ⌘ Read more
Interview with Miguel de Icaza about his own journey, GNU, Linux, GNOME, and open source software in general. It’s an interview for a mainstream audience, but with plenty of fun stories that should entertain any OSNews reader. ⌘ Read more