State of the terminal 17 May 2024, 2:26 am

It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve begun to dig deep into the inner workings of how terminal emulators, and the applications that run inside of them, really work. I’ve learned that there is a lot of innovation and creative problem solving happening in this space, even though the underlying technology is over half a century old.

I’ve also found that many people who use terminal based tools (including shells like Bash and editors like Vim) know very little about terminals themselves, or some of the modern features and capabilities they can support.

In this article, we’ll discuss some of the problems that terminal based applications have historically had to deal with (and what the modern solutions are) as well as some features that modern terminal emulators support that you may not be aware of.

↫ Gregory Anders

I don’t use the terminal much – usually just to update my systems – but on occasion I’ve had to really sit down and explore them more than usual, especially now that my workstation runs OpenBSD, and the depth and breadth of features, options, and clever tricks they possess is amazing. Over the past half century they’ve accumulated a lot of features along the way, and even though its unlikely to ever be for me, I can somewhat begin to appreciate why some people just tile a bunch of terminals on their screens and do all their computing that way.

I grew up with MS-DOS and Windows 3.x and later, so I’m just too attached to my mouse and pretty icons to switch to a terminal lifestyle, but over the years I’ve seen some pretty amazing terminal applications, from Mastodon clients to complex mail applications and web browsers, and you can be sure none of them steal your data or show you ads.

Maybe the terminal people are right after all.

Virtual Boy: the bizarre rise and quick fall of Nintendo’s enigmatic red console 17 May 2024, 12:56 am

Nearly 30 years after the launch of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about how, exactly, Nintendo came to be interested in developing what would ultimately become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as a future for video games and looking for technological solutions that made business sense? Or was the Virtual Boy primarily the result of Nintendo going “off script” and seizing a unique, and possibly risky, opportunity that presented itself? The answer is probably a little bit of both.

As it turns out, the Virtual Boy was not an anomaly in Nintendo’s history with video game platforms. Rather, it was the result of a deliberate strategy that was consistent with Nintendo’s way of doing things and informed by its lead creator Gunpei Yokoi’s design philosophy.

↫ Benj Edwards and Jose Zagal at Ars Technica

I’ve never used a Virtual Boy, and in fact, I’ve never even seen one in real life. It was mythical object when I was not even a teenager yet, something we read about in gaming magazines in The Netherlands. We didn’t really know what it was or how it worked, and it wasn’t until much later, in the early YouTube age, that I got to see what using one was actually like in the countless YouTube videos made about the device.

It seems it caused quite a few headaches, was cumbersome to use, had very few games, and those that were sold ended up collecting dust pretty quickly. In that sense, it seems not a lot has changed over the past thirty years.

Winamp to “open up” its source code 17 May 2024, 12:50 am

Winamp has announced that on 24 September 2024, the application’s source code will be open to developers worldwide.

Winamp will open up its code for the player used on Windows, enabling the entire community to participate in its development. This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve.

↫ Winamp press release

Nice, I guess, but twenty years to late to be of any relevance. At least it’ll be great for software preservation.

But what’s up with the odd language used in the press release, and the weirdly specific date that’s month from now? They really seem to want to avoid the term “open source”, which makes me think this is going to be one of those cases where they hope the community will work for them for free without actually using a real open source license. You know, those schemes that always – no exception – fail.

The X Window System and the curse of NumLock 16 May 2024, 10:10 pm

Ordinary modifiers are normally straightforward, in that they are additional keys that are held down as you type the main key. Control, Shift, and Alt all work this way (by default). However, some modifiers are ‘sticky’, where you tap their key once to turn them on and then tap their key again to turn them off. The obvious example of this is Caps Lock (unless you turn its effects off, remapping its physical key to be, say, another Ctrl key). Another example, one that many X users have historically wound up quietly cursing, is NumLock. Why people wind up cursing NumLock, and why I have a program to control its state, is because of how X programs (such as window managers) often do their key and mouse button bindings.

↫ Chris Siebenmann

I always have an applet in my KDE panel that shows me if I have any sticky modifiers enabled without realising it. On some of my keyboards, this isn’t always easily noticable, especially when you’re focused on what’s happening on your display. A little icon that only shows up when a sticky modifier is engaged solves this problem, as it immediately stands out in your peripheral vision.

Qualcomm details Linux on Snapdragon X Elite, and it’s looking surprisingly good 16 May 2024, 2:07 am

With Qualcomm and Microsoft about to flood the market with devices using the new Snapdragon X Elite, those of us who don’t want to use Windows felt a bit uneasy – what’s Linux support going to look like for this new generation of ARM devices? Well, it seems Qualcomm’s been busy, and they’ve published a blog post detailing their work on Linux support for the X Elite.

It’s been our priority not only to support Linux on our premium-tier SoCs, but to support it pronto. In fact, within one or two days of publicly announcing each generation of Snapdragon 8, we’ve posted the initial patchset for Linux kernel support. Snapdragon X Elite was no exception: we announced on October 23 of last year and posted the patchset the next day. That was the result of a lot of pre-announcement work to get everything up and running on Linux and Debian.

↫ Qualcomm’s developer blog

In the blog post, the company details exactly which X Elite features have already been merged into mainline with Linux 6.8 and 6.9, as well as which features will be merged into mainline in Linux 6.10 and 6.11, and to be quite frank – it’s looking really solid, especially considering this is Qualcomm we’re talking about. Over the coming six months, they’re going to focus on getting end-to-end hardware video decoding working, including in Firefox and Chrome, as well as various CPU and GPU optimisations, adding the required firmware to the linux-firmware package, and providing access to easy installers.

All in all, it’s looking like the X Elite will be exceptionally well supported by Linux before the year’s over.

The blog post also details the boot path for Linux on the X Elite, and that, too, is looking good. It’s using a standard UEFI boot process, and supports GRUB and systemd-boot out of the box. Linux boots up using devicetrees, though, and apparently, there’s a known problem with using those that Qualcomm and the community are working on.

We’re working closely with upstream communities on an open problem with the UEFI-based BIOS while booting with devicetrees. The problem is that, when you have more than one devicetree blob (DTB) packed into the firmware package flashed on the device, there is no standard way of selecting a devicetree to pass on to the kernel. OEMs commonly put multiple DTBs into the firmware package so it will support devices with slightly different SKUs, so we’re keen to solve this problem.

↫ Qualcomm’s developer blog

I am pleasantly surprised by the openness and straightforwardness Qualcomm is showing the Linux community here, and I really hope this is a sign of how the company will keep supporting its laptop and possibly desktop-oriented SoCs from here on out. It seems like next year we will finally be getting competitive ARM laptops that can run Linux in a fully supported fashion.

Android 15 beta 2 released 16 May 2024, 1:52 am

Google released Android 15 beta 2 today, and with it, they unveiled some more of the new features coming to Android later this year when the final release lands. Android 15 comes with something called a private space, an area with an extra layer of authentication where you can keep applications and data hidden away, such as banking applications or health data. It’s effectively a separate user profile, and shows up as a separate area in the application drawer when unlocked. When locked, it disappears entirely from sight, share sheets, and so on.

Another awesome new feature is Theft Detection Lock, which uses Google “AI” to detect when a phone is snatched out of your hands by someone running, biking, or driving away, and instantly locks it. Theft like this is quite common in certain areas, and this seems like an excellent use of “AI” (i.e., accelerometer data) to discourage thieves from trying this.

There’s also a bunch of smaller stuff, like custom vibration patterns per notification, giving applications partial access to only your most recent photos and videos, system-wide preferences for which gender you’d like to be addressed as in gendered languages (French gets this feature first), and a whole lot more.

Developers also get a lot to play with here, from safer intents to something like ANGLE:

Vulkan is Android’s preferred interface to the GPU. Therefore, Android 15 includes ANGLE as an optional layer for running OpenGL ES on top of Vulkan. Moving to ANGLE will standardize the Android OpenGL implementation for improved compatibility, and, in some cases, improved performance. You can test out your OpenGL ES app stability and performance with ANGLE by enabling the developer option in Settings -> System -> Developer Options -> Experimental: Enable ANGLE on Android 15.

↫ Android developer blog

You can install Android 15 beta 2 on a number f Pixel devices and devices from other OEMs starting today. I installed it on my Pixel 8 Pro, and after a few hours I haven’t really noticed anything breaking, but that’s really not enough time to make any meaningful observations.

Google also detailed Wear OS 5.

Later this year, battery life optimizations are coming to watches with Wear OS 5. For example, running an outdoor marathon will consume up to 20% less power when compared to watches with Wear OS 4. And your fitness apps will be able to help improve your performance with the option to support more data types like ground contact time, stride length and vertical oscillation.

↫ Android developer blog

Wear OS 5 will also improve the Watch Face Format with more complications, which is very welcome, because the selection of complications is currently rather meager. Wear OS 5 will also ship later this year.

Raspberry Pi officially announces intent to IPO 15 May 2024, 11:17 pm

As expected earlier this year, Raspberry Pi is going public on the stock exchange in London. Back then, CEO Eben Upton said he did not expect the IPO to change how Raspberry Pi did things, but history tells us that initial public offerings tend to, well, change how companies do things. In their official announcement that they intend to hold an IPO, there’s an incredibly interesting and telling contradiction, as noted by @yassie_j on MastoAkkoma:

Raspberry Pi, in their listing press release, says: The Enthusiast and Education market is the “heart” of the Raspberry Pi movement.

But also says: Industrial and Embedded market […] accounts [for] over 72 per cent

So the heart seems to be going neglected, it seems, because there’s no way you’re going to not cash in on industrial applications. Especially when you’ve just done a big IPO.

↫ @yassie_j on Akkoma

This exactly illustrates the fears we all have about what an IPO is going to mean for Raspberry Pi. It’s already become increasingly more difficult for enthusiasts to get their hands on the latest Raspberry Pi models, but once the IPO’s done and there’s shareholders breathing down their neck, that will most likely only get worse. If the industrial and embedded market is where you’re making most of your money, where do you think Raspberry Pi devices are going to end up?

Luckily the market’s a lot bigger and more varied now than it was back when Raspberry Pi was new, so we have a wide variety of options to choose from. Still, I’m definitely worried about what Raspberry Pi, as a company, will look like five, ten years from now.

NetBSD bans use of Copilot-generated code 15 May 2024, 9:44 pm

The NetBSD project seems to agree with me that code generated by “AI” like Copilot is tainted, and cannot be used safely. The project’s added a new guideline banning the use of code generated by such tools from being added to NetBSD unless explicitly permitted by “core“, NetBSD’s equivalent, roughly, of “technical management”.

Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta’s Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.

↫ NetBSD Commit Guidelines

GitHub Copilot is copyright infringement and open source license violation at an industrial scale, and as I keep reiterating – the fact Microsoft is not training Copilot on its own closed-source code tells you all you need to know about what Microsoft thinks about the legality of Copilot.

GNOME OS is switching from OSTree to systemd-sysupdate 15 May 2024, 6:37 pm

I’m pretty sure most of you are familiar with KDE Neon, the distribution KDE maintains to provide easy access to the latest KDE technologies. However, did you know GNOME has something similar, called GNOME OS? It’s been around for a while, but has a far lower profile than KDE Neon does, and it seems they want to change that and put more of a spotlight on GNOME OS.

GNOME OS is an immutable distribution using OSTree, the same technology used by the various popular immutable versions from the Fedora family. It seems GNOME OS is working to leave OSTree behind, and move to systemd-sysupdate instead, which has been available since systemd 251, released in May 2022. The developers claim this will bring the following benefits:

• Provide a trust chain from the bootloader, all the way up, both online and offline;
• Achieve a closer integration with systemd;
• Advance our support for image-based design and its benefits, e.g., immutability, auto-updating, adaptability, factory reset, uniformity and other modernised security properties around image-based OSes.

↫ Martín Abente Lahaye, Sam Thursfield

To complete the move from OSTree to systemd-sysupdate, a few things need to be completed. First, the boot process and root filesystem had to be migrated, which was done last year. Second, sysupdate needs to integrated into GNOME, as for now, you can only use it via the command line. This work is ongoing, and requires a new D-Bus service and polkit integration to allow GNOME Software to manage the update process. Of course, there’s more work that needs to be done to complete this migration, but these are the main tasks.

All of this work is part of the project’s goal to make GNOME OS nightlies viable for daily-driving for quality assurance purposes, and I’m sure all this work will also make GNOME OS more attractive to people outside of the developer community. It’s basically GNOME/systemd taken to the extreme, and while that will surely make quite a few people groan, I personally find it great that this will make GNOME OS a more capable choice for everyone.

That’s what open source is all about, in the end.

Google now offers ‘web’ search — and an “AI” opt-out button 15 May 2024, 2:24 pm

This is not a joke: Google will now let you perform a “web” search. It’s rolling out “web” searches now, and in my early tests on desktop, it’s looking like it could be an incredibly popular change to Google’s search engine.

The optional setting filters out almost all the other blocks of content that Google crams into a search results page, leaving you with links and text — and Google confirms to The Verge that it will block the company’s new AI Overviews as well.

↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge

I hate what the web has become.

The new APT 3.0 solver 15 May 2024, 1:46 am

A crucial but often entirely transparent feature of a modern package management system like Debian’s APT is its solver – basically the set of rules and instruction on how to handle dependencies when installing a package. APT is currently in the process of radically changing its solver, the first bits of which can be found in APT 2.9.3, referred to as solver3. Many of the changes and improvements get a little into the weeds and will mostly be transparent to users, but there is one feature the new solver will enable that many of you will be incredibly excited about.

One of the core new capabilities of solver3 is the implication graph.

As part of the solving phase, we also construct an implication graph, albeit a partial one: The first package installing another package is marked as the reason (A -> B), the same thing for conflicts (not A -> not B).

↫ Julian Andres Klode

Seems rather innocuous at first sight, but here’s what the implication graph will make possible:

The implication graph building allows us to implement an apt why command, that while not as nicely detailed as aptitude, at least tells you the exact reason why a package is installed. It will only show the strongest dependency chain at first of course, since that is what we record.

↫ Julian Andres Klode

If you’ve ever dealt with packaging issues – probably when running -testing or similar unstable distributions that use APT, a command that tells you exactly why a package is installed is an absolute godsend. Sure, aptitude exists, but aptitude takes you out of your current CLI workflow, whereas this will be much easier to quickly run.

There’s more features solver3 will enable, but this one is definitely one of my favourite low-level additions to APT in a long, long time.

Google details some of the “AI” features coming to Android 15 May 2024, 12:11 am

Google I/O, the company’s developer conference, started today, but for the first time since I can remember, Android and Chrome OS have been relegated to day two of the conference. The first day was all about “AI”, most of which I’m not even remotely interested in, except of course where it related to Google’s operating system offerings.

And the company did have a few things to say about “AI” on Android, and the general gist is that yeah, they’re going to be stuffing it into every corner of the operating system. Google’s “AI” tool Gemini will be integrated deeply into Android, and you’ll be able to call up an overlay wherever you are in the operating system, and do things like summarise a PDF that’s on screen, summarise a YouTube video, generate images on the fly and drop them into emails and conversations, and so on.

A more interesting and helpful “AI” addition is using it to improve TalkBack, so that people with impaired vision can let the device describe images on the screen for them. Google claims TalkBack users come across about 90 images without description every day (!), so this is a massive improvement for people with impaired vision, and a genuinely helpful and worthwhile “AI” feature.

Creepier is that Google’s “AI” will also be able to listen along with your phone calls, and warn you if an ongoing conversation is a scamming attempt. If the person on the other end of the line claiming to be your bank asks you to move a bunch of money around to keep it safe, Gemini will pop up and warn you it’s a scam, since banks don’t ask you such things. Clever, sure, but also absolutely terrifying and definitely not something I’ll be turning on.

Google claims all of these features take place on-device, so privacy should be respected, but I’m always a bit unsure about such things staying that way in the future. Regardless, “AI” is coming to Android in a big way, but I’m just here wondering how much of it I’ll be able to turn off.

VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion pro go free for personal use 14 May 2024, 11:14 pm

After Broadcom acquired VMware, there’s been a steady stream of worrying or outright bad news for people using VMware products at home, for personal use, as enthusiasts. The biggest blow to the enthusiast market was the end of perpetual licensing, forcing people into subscriptions instead. Finally, though it seems we’re getting some good news.

The most exciting part is that Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro will now have two license models. We now provide a Free Personal Use or a Paid Commercial Use subscription for our Pro apps. Users will decide based on their use case whether a commercial subscription is required.

This means that everyday users who want a virtual lab on their Mac, Windows or Linux computer can do so for free simply by registering and downloading the bits from the new download portal located at support.broadcom.com.

↫ Michael Roy on the VMware blog

This is definitely good news for us enthusiasts, and it means I won’t have to buy a cheap VMware license off eBay every few years anymore, so I’m quite satisfied here. However, with VMware under Broadcom focusing more and more on the enterprise and squeezing every last penny out of those customers, one has to wonder if this ‘free for personal use’ is just a prelude to winding down the development of enthusiasts’ tools altogether.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a product going free for personal use was a harbinger of worse things yet to come.

Google is experimenting with running Chrome OS on Android 14 May 2024, 5:02 pm

Now that Android – since version 13 – ships with the Android Virtualisation Framework, Google can start doing interesting things with it. It turns out the first interesting thing Google wants do with it is run Chrome OS inside of it.

Even though AVF was initially designed around running small workloads in a highly stripped-down build of Android loaded in an isolated virtual machine, there’s technically no reason it can’t be used to run other operating systems. As a matter of fact, this was demonstrated already when developer Danny Lin got Windows 11 running on an Android phone back in 2022. Google itself never officially provided support for running anything other than its custom build of Android called “microdroid” in AVF, but that’s no longer the case. The company has started to offer official support for running Chromium OS, the open-source version of Chrome OS, on Android phones through AVF, and it has even been privately demoing this to other companies.

At a privately held event, Google recently demonstrated a special build of Chromium OS — code-named “ferrochrome” — running in a virtual machine on a Pixel 8. However, Chromium OS wasn’t shown running on the phone’s screen itself. Rather, it was projected to an external display, which is possible because Google recently enabled display output on its Pixel 8 series. Time will tell if Google is thinking of positioning Chrome OS as a platform for its desktop mode ambitions and Samsung DeX rival.

↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority

It seems that Google is in the phase of exploring if there are any OEMs interested in allowing users to plug their Android phone into an external display and input devices and run Chrome OS on it. This sounds like an interesting approach to the longstanding dream of convergence – one device for all your computing needs – but at the same time, it feels quite convoluted to have your Android device emulate an entire Chrome OS installation.

What a damning condemnation of Android as a platform that despite years of trying, Google just can’t seem to make Android and its applications work in a desktop form factor. I’ve tried to shoehorn Android into a desktop workflow, and it’s quite hard, despite third parties having made some interesting tools to help you along. It really seems Android just does not want to be anywhere else but on a mobile touch display.

Nintendo Switch hacked to run Windows 11 on Arm 14 May 2024, 4:32 pm

As Nintendo Switch unlocks and homebrew software develops, people are inclined to explore the possibilities and whether or not they actually provide a good experience. Our new prime example seems to be a full install of Windows 11 Arm on the Switch. As noted by @PatRyk on Twitter, who actually set this up, the experience is pretty grueling! The initial installation took three hours, and even basic system tasks were unresponsive.

↫ Christopher Harper at Tom’s Hardware

Silly, sure, but efforts like these all contribute to emulation efforts, which will eventually be important once Nintendo drops support for this machine and they become increasingly harder to get. Give it a decade or so and we’ll need the Switch emulators to keep playing Switch games.

EA is prototyping in-game ads even as we speak 14 May 2024, 12:16 pm

Electronic Arts has a long, storied history of trying to wring more money out of gamers after they’ve purchased a game — now, it appears, the company’s hard at work on its next generation of in-game ads.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson admitted as much on the company’s Q4 earnings call: when an analyst asked about “the market opportunity for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games,” he said the company’s already working on it.

“We have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences,” said Wilson.

↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge

Ads in games are definitely not new – we’ve seen countless games built entirely around brands, like Tapper for Budweiser, Pepsiman, or Cool Spot for 7-Up – and banner ads and product placement in various games has been a thing for decades, too. It seems like EA wants to take this several steps further and use things like dynamic ad insertion in games, so that when you’re playing some racing game, you’ll get an ad for your local Hyundai dealer, or an ad for a gun store when you’re playing GTA in the US.

Either way, it’s going to make games worse, which is perfectly in line with EA’s mission.