Cinnamon Desktop 6.4 released 28 Nov 2024, 11:32 pm

The Cinnamon Desktop, the GTK desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint project, has just released version 6.4. The focus of this release is on nips and tucks in the default theme, dialogs, menus, and other user interface elements. They seem to have taken a few pages out of GNOME’s book, especially when it comes to dialogs and the OSD, which honestly makes sense considering Cinnamon is also GTK and most Cinnamon users will be running a ton of GNOME/Libadwaita applications.

There’s also a new night light feature to reduce eyestrain, vastly improved options for power profiles and management, and more. Cinnamon 6.4 will be part of Linux Mint’s next major release, coming in late December, but is most likely already making its way to various other distributions’ repositories.

So you want to write a KMail plugin? 27 Nov 2024, 11:18 pm

Recently, I’ve been moving away from macOS to Linux, and have settled on using KDE Plasma as my desktop environment. For the most part I’ve been comfortable with the change, but it’s always the small things that get me. For example, the Mail app built into macOS provides an “Unsubscribe” button for emails.

[…]

Apparently this is also supported in some webmail clients, but I’m not interested in accessing my email that way. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an X11 or Wayland email client that supports this sort of functionality, so I decided to implement it myself. And anyway, I’m trying out Kontact for my mail at the moment, which supports plugins. So why not use this as an opportunity to build one?

↫ datagirl.xyz

Writing a Kmail plugin like this feels a bit like an arcane art, because the process is not documented as well as it could be, and I doubt that other than KDE developers themselves, very few people are interested in writing these kinds of plugins. In fact, I can’t find a single one listed on the KDE Store, and searching around I can’t find anything either, other than the ones that come with KDE. It seems like this particular plugin interface is designed more to make it easy for KDE developers to extend and alter Kmail than it is for third parties to do so – and that’s fine.

Still, this means that if some third party does want to write such a plugin, there’s some sleuthing and hacking to be done, and that’s exactly the process this article details. In the end, we end up with a working unsubscribe plugin, with the code on git so others can learn from it. While this may not interest a large number of people, it’s vital to have information like this out on the web for those precious few to find – so excellent work.

US Copyright Office strikes down proposed game preservation DMCA exception 27 Nov 2024, 11:03 pm

A three-year fight to help support game preservation has come to a sad end today. The US copyright office has denied a request for a DMCA exemption that would allow libraries to remotely share digital access to preserved video games.

↫ Dustin Bailey at GamesRadar

This was always going to end in favour of the massive gaming industry with effectively bottomless bank accounts and more lawyers than god. The gist is that Section 1201 of the DMCA prevents libraries from circumventing the copy protection to make games available remotely. Much like books, libraries loan out books not just for research purposes, but also for entertainment purposes, and that’s where the issue lies, according to the Copyright Office, who wrote “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes”.

The games industry doesn’t care about old titles nobody wants to buy anymore and no consumer is interested in. There’s a long tail of games that have no monetary value whatsoever, and there’s a relatively small number of very popular older games that the industry wants to keep repackaging and reselling forever – I mean, we can’t have a new Nintendo console without the opportunity to buy Mario Bros. for the 67th time. That’d be ludicrous.

In order to protect the continued free profits from those few popular retro titles, the endless list of other games only a few nerds are interested in are sacrificed.

The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory 27 Nov 2024, 9:05 pm

There have been some past rumblings on the internet about a capacitor being installed backwards in Apple’s Macintosh LC III. The LC III was a “pizza box” Mac model produced from early 1993 to early 1994, mainly targeted at the education market. It also manifested as various consumer Performa models: the 450, 460, 466, and 467. Clearly, Apple never initiated a huge recall of the LC III, so I think there is some skepticism in the community about this whole issue. Let’s look at the situation in more detail and understand the circuit. Did Apple actually make a mistake?

↫ Doug Brown

Even I had heard of these claims, and I’m not particularly interested in Apple retrocomputing, other than whatever comes by on Adrian Black or whatever. As such, it surprises me that there hasn’t been any definitive answer to this question – with the amount of interest in classic Macs you’d think this would simply be a settled issue and everyone would know about it. This vintage of Macs pretty much require recaps by now, so I assumed if Apple indeed soldered on a capacitor backwards, it’d just be something listed in the various recapping guides.

It took some very minor digging with the multimeter, but yes, one of the capacitors on this family of boards is soldered on the wrong way, with the positive terminal where the negative terminal should be. It seems the error does not lie with whomever soldered the capacitors on the boards – or whomever set the machine that did so – because the silkscreen is labeled incorrectly, too. The reason it doesn’t seem to be noticeable problem during the expected lifespan of the computer is because it was rated at 16V, but was only taking in -5V.

So, if you plan on recapping one of these classic Macs – you might as well fix the error.

Mozilla begs courts to allow Google search deal for Firefox to continue 27 Nov 2024, 12:38 am

The moment a lot of us has been fearing may be soon upon us. Among the various remedies proposed by the United States Department of Justice to address Google’s monopoly abuse, there’s also banning Google from spending money to become the default search engine on other devices, platforms, or applications.

“We strongly urge the Court to consider remedies that improve search competition without harming independent browsers and browser engines,” a Mozilla spokesperson tells PCMag.

Mozilla points to a key but less eye-catching proposal from the DOJ to regulate Google’s search business, which a judge ruled as a monopoly in August. In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.

↫ Michael Kan at PC Mag

Obviously Mozilla is urging the courts to reconsider this remedy, because it would instantly cut more than 80% of Mozilla’s revenue. As I’ve been saying for years now, the reason Firefox seems to be getting worse is because of Mozilla is desperately trying to find other sources of revenue, and they seem to think advertising is their best bet – even going so far as working together with Facebook. Imagine how much more invasive and user-hostile these attempts are going to get if Mozilla suddenly loses 80% of its revenue?

For so, so many years now I’ve been warning everyone about just how fragile the future of Firefox was, and every one of my worries and predictions have become reality. If Mozilla now loses 80% of its funding, which platform Firefox officially supports do you think will feel the sting of inevitable budget cuts, scope reductions, and even more layoffs first? The future of especially Firefox on Linux is hanging by a thread, and with everyone lulled into a false sense of complacency by Chrome and its many shady skins, nobody in the Linux community seems to have done anything to prepare for this near inevitability.

With no proper, fully-featured replacements in the works, Linux distributions, especially ones with strict open source requirements, will most likely be forced to ship with de-Googled Chromium variants by default once Firefox becomes incompatible with such requirements. And no matter how much you take Google out of Chromium, it’s still effectively a Google product, leaving most Linux users entirely at the whim of big tech for the most important application they have.

We’re about to enter a very, very messy time for browsing on Linux.

Leaving big tech behind: Murena’s /e/OS on the Fairphone 5 25 Nov 2024, 10:57 pm

There are so many ecological, environmental, and climate problems and disasters taking place all over the world that it’s sometimes hard to see the burning forests through the charred tree stumps. As at best middle-income individuals living in this corporate line-must-go-up hellscape, there’s only so much we can do turn the rising tides of fascism and leave at least a semblance of a livable world for our children and grandchildren. Of course, the most elementary thing we can do is not vote for science-denying death cults who believe everything is some non-existent entity’s grand plan, but other than that, what’s really our impact if we drive a little less or use paper straws, when some wealthy robber baron flying his private jet to Florida to kiss the gaudy gold ring to signal his obedience does more damage to our world in one flight than we do in a year of driving to our underpaid, expendable job?

Income, financial, health, and other circumstances allowing, all we can do are the little things to make ourselves feel better, usually in areas in which we are knowledgeable. In technology, it might seem like there’s not a whole lot we can do, but actually there’s quite a few steps we can take. One of the biggest things you, as an individual knowledgeable about and interested in tech, can do to give the elite and ruling class the finger is to move away from big tech, their products, and their services – no more Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. This is often a long, tedious, and difficult process, as most of us will discover that we rely on a lot more big tech products than we initially thought. It’s like an onion that looks shiny and tasty on the outside, but is rotting from the inside – the more layers you peel away, the dirtier and nastier it gets.

Also you start crying.

I’ve been in the process of eradicating as much of big tech out of my life for a long time now. Since four or five years ago, all my desktop and laptop PCs run Linux, from my dual-Xeon workstation to my high-end gaming PC (ignore that spare parts PC that runs Windows just for League of Legends. That stupid game is my guilty pleasure and I will not give it up), from my XPS 13 laptop to my little Home Assistant thin client. I’ve never ordered a single thing from Amazon and have no Prime subscription or whatever it is, so that one was a freebie. Apple I banished from my life long ago, so that’s another freebie. Sadly, that other device most of us carry with us remained solidly in the big tech camp, as I’ve been using an Android phone for a long time, filled to the brim with Google products, applications, and services. There really isn’t a viable alternative to the Android and iOS duopoly.

Or is there?

Well, in a roundabout way, there is an alternative to iOS and Google’s Android. You can’t do much to take the Apple out of an iPhone, but there’s a lot you can do to take the Google out of an Android phone. Unless or until an independent third platform ever manages to take serious hold – godspeed, our saviour – de-Googled Android, as it’s called, is your best bet at having a fully functional, modern smartphone that’s as free from big tech as you want it to be, without leaving you with a barely usable, barebones experience. While you can install a de-Googled ROM yourself, as there’s countless to choose from, this is not an option for everyone, since not everyone has the skills, time, and/or supported devices to do so.

Murena, Fairphone, and sustainable mining

This is where Murena comes in. Murena is a French company – founded by Gaël Duval, of Mandrake Linux fame – that develops /e/OS, a de-Googled Android using microG (which Murena also supports financially), which it makes available for anyone to install on supported devices, while also selling various devices with /e/OS preinstalled. Murena goes one step further, however, by also offering something called Murena Workspace – a branded Nextcloud offering that works seamlessly with /e/OS. In other words, if you buy an /e/OS smartphone from Murena, you get the complete package of smartphone, mobile operating system, and cloud services that’s very similar to buying a regular Android phone or an iPhone.

To help me test this complete package of smartphone, de-Googled Android, and cloud services, Murena loaned me a Fairphone 5 with /e/OS preinstalled, and while this article mostly focuses on the /e/OS experience, we should first talk a little bit about the relationship between Murena and Fairphone. Murena and Fairphone are partners, and Murena has been selling /e/OS Fairphones for a while now. Most of us will be familiar with Fairphone – it’s a Dutch company focused on designing and selling smartphones and related accessories that are are user-repairable and long-lasting, while also trying everything within their power to give full insight into their supply chain.

This is important, because every smartphone contains quite a few materials that are unsustainably mined. Many mines are destructive to the environment, have horrible working conditions, or even sink as low as employing children. Even companies priding themselves on being environmentally responsible and sustainable, like Apple, are guilty of partaking in and propping up such mining endeavours. As consumers, there isn’t much we can do – the network of supply chains involved in making a smartphone is incredibly complex and opaque, and there’s basically nothing normal people can do to really fully know on whose underpaid or even underage shoulders their smartphone is built.

This holiday season, Murena and Fairphone are collaborating on exactly this issue of the conditions in mines used to acquire the metals and minerals in our phones. Instead of offering big discounts (that barely eat into margins and often follow sharp price increases right before the holidays), Murena and Fairphone will donate €40 of every Fairphone sold through Murena to a Fairmined-certified Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) project in Colombia; more specifically, the Iquira mine in Huila, an agromining cooperative that has achieved stellar results in responsible, sustainable, and safe mining.

Will buying a Fairphone with /e/OS like this change the world overnight? Will that €40 going to a few miners in Colombia instead of Apple’s or Google’s offshore effectively tax-exempt bank accounts have a material impact for the Pacific island nations on the verge of flooding permanently? Will it stop the endless forest fires in California? Will it stop the ongoing genocide in Ukraine? Will it prevent the utter destruction of what little nature is left in The Netherlands at the hands of industrial farming megacorps poisoning the soil and water with nitrogen and ammonia? No, but it will make you feel better, and give the finger to big tech, in one single purchase.

/e/OS: annoying to type, but great to use

If you have little to no experience with Android without Google, you might be worried about what you’re giving up, if things will work properly, or if it’s some sort of massive sea change from what you’re used to. The answer is simple: using a de-Googled Android device is an entirely boring affair in that it’s almost identical to using a regular Android device, except with Google’s products and services being optional, rather than mandatory. While nothing from Google comes preinstalled, that doesn’t mean you can’t choose to selectively install a few products or services from Google you’d still like to use, for instance because you’re not ready yet to move to an alternative, or because friends and family would really like you to stay on Google Meet or whatever (I’m sure those people exist).

Do you want to keep using Google Photos? No problem, just install it and it works just fine, exactly like you’re used to. Have a particular fondness for the official Gmail application? Works like normal. And so on. Buying a de-Googled /e/OS device does not have to be a clean break from everything Google; what it really does is give you the choice to use certain Google products, as opposed to regular Android which forces a whole slew of Google products and services down your throat because they come preinstalled thanks to agreements between Google and OEMs.

De-Googling goes much further than just removing Google’s applications. /e/OS also replaces various core services with privacy-respecting and open source ones, like using HERE’s geolocation services instead of Google’s, not using Google’s servers for things like connectivity checks and NTP, replacing Google Search with a custom SearX-based search engine, and much more that most people probably never think about.

Despite – or because of? – these changes, /e/OS is fully functional out of the box as a modern smartphone, including non-Google replacements for essentials like SMS, browsing, contacts, the phone dialer, and so on. Through Murena Workspace, you also get things like contacts sync, an online drive, calendar functionality, and so on – all privacy-focused, of course, so no data harvesting. The free package offers limited storage, of course, so if you want to make considerable use of it you do need to pay up, but the prices are very reasonable. On top of that, it’s just Nextcloud, so you can self-host the whole thing too if you want to.

Installing applications is also a rather uneventful affair. /e/OS comes with App Lounge, /e/OS’ own application store frontend that provides access to the Play Store, F-droid, and a set of progressive web apps. While you can sign into the Play Store to gain access to applications you already own, App Lounge also provides completely anonymous access to the Play Store. In other words, you have access to the same applications as you would have on Google Android, and they’re installed and updated in pretty much the same way. If you know how to find and install applications on Google Android, you know how to find and install applications on /e/OS. And if you don’t like the App Lounge’s interface, you can install an alternative like Aurora Store.

While a lot of things work without issues, there are still limitations to using de-Googled Android. /e/OS makes use of microG, an open source implementation of various proprietary parts of the Google Play Services, and while compatibility is very good and most people will get by without ever running into issues, there are still some limitations. Basically, anything that relies too heavily on Google Play Services runs the risk of not working, and in my case, that meant I ran into a few issues. Both of my smartwatches’ companion applications, for the Pixel Watch 2 and the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Classic, would not work, meaning I couldn’t pair and use them with /e/OS. Out of all my usual Android applications, only one didn’t work: the eBay application. It loads the UI, but then perpetually tries and fails to load the content.

Another major limitation that might be a dealbreaker for some is the fact that buying Play Store applications, as well as in-application purchases in Play Store applications, do not work. There are some workarounds, but this is an important limitation you should be aware of before jumping in, and thankfully, Murena makes no secret of it, and states it upfront to make potential buyers aware of it.

There are also limitations that have nothing to do with Google Play Services, that are of a more structural nature and most likely can’t be addressed by further improvements to microG. One example of this is support for RCS – the Rich Communication Standard – that’s become Google’s default messaging service, and was recently embraced by Apple for the iPhone, too. Due to a variety of reasons not everybody seems to fully understand, getting RCS to work using microG without approval from Google and/or the carriers seems very unlikely, since RCS is not an open standard or open source. Using Google Pay’s tap-to-pay functionality in stores using NFC is also not going to work, since it requires Google’s blessing, which seems highly unlikely to be given (unless the EU forces them to, I guess).

A major concern for most people interested in switching to de-Googled Android is banking. This one’s really a very mixed bag, and depends entirely on whatever your bank decides to do. For me here in Sweden all my banking and national ID applications work without any issues, and while that seems to be the case for most countries, there are also some banks who will simply block any phone that isn’t running a fully stock Android from Google or one of the main OEMs. There’s a list on the /e/OS forums keeping track of various countries’ banking applications, so be sure to check that list and search the web to confirm whether or not your banking application works properly. This is another case where at least us EU citizens can perhaps look to the EU for a more permanent solution.

Conclusion

All in all though, I was quite surprised by how well /e/OS actually works out of the box. I expected many more applications to be unavailable or broken, but after a few weeks I was pleasantly surprised to realise that I wasn’t really missing Google’s version of Android on my Pixel 8 Pro at all. After the initial setup and excitement of no longer being tied to Google through my smartphone had worn off, I was left with a capable, solid, and entirely uneventful Android experience, including regular updates and security fixes.

At the same time, I don’t want to create the false impression that everything just works flawlessly, and as I detailed, there simply will be things that don’t work due to microG not supporting every Google Play Services API, or because of strict restrictions some applications enforce with regards to which devices they will run on. Before you make the jump from Google Android to /e/OS, I strongly advise you to take stock of which applications (and possibly, third party devices like a smart watch you might own) you truly rely on and which have no alternatives, and spend an evening searching the web and the Murena forums to figure out if there’s anything that doesn’t work and that you truly can’t live without. On top of that, also be sure to peruse the long list of support documents from Murena about /e/OS, just to be on the safe side.

I found /e/OS to be immensely impressive, and it highlighted for me that it’s definitely possible to have a smartphone that’s not tied to either Google or Apple. As such, in recent weeks, I have moved my Pixel 8 Pro away from Google’s Android to a de-Googled version of Android, while also removing a whole slew of other Google services and products from my life. If you want to do the same, a Fairphone 5 running /e/OS is an excellent starting point, especially right now when through buying one, you’re also helping some nice people in Colombia operate a sustainable, cooperative gold mine.

Neither will change the world, but they will make you feel better about yourself, while giving the finger to big tech. Seems like a great deal to me.

Managing third-party packages in 9front 24 Nov 2024, 11:38 pm

Every now and then, news from the club I’m too cool to join, the plan9/9front community, pierces the veil of coolness and enters our normal world. This time, someone accidentally made a package manager for 9front.

I’ve been growing tired of manually handling random software, so I decided to find a simple way to automate the process and ended up making a sort of “package manager” for 9front¹. It’s really just a set of shell scripts that act as a frontend for git and keep a simple database of package names and URLs.

Running the pkginit script will ask for a location to store the source files for installed packages (/sys/pkg by default) which will then be created if non-existent.

And that’s it! No, really. Now you can provide a URL for a git repository to pkg/add.

↫ Kelly “bubstance” Glenn

As I somehow expected from 9front, it’s quite a simple and elegant system. I’m not sure how well it would handle more complex package operations, but I doubt many 9front systems are complex to begin with, so this may just be enough to take some of the tedium out of managing software on 9front, as the author originally intended.

One day I will be cool enough to use 9front. I just have to stay cool.

Microsoft Word is using you to train “AI” 24 Nov 2024, 11:25 pm

Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.

↫ Dr. Casey Lawrence

The author of this article, Dr. Casey Lawrence, mentions the opt-out checkbox is hard to find, and they aren’t kidding. On Windows, here’s the full snaking path you have to take through Word’s settings to get to the checkbox: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”. That is absolutely bananas. No normal person is ever going to find this checkbox.

Anyway, remember how the “AI” believers kept saying “hey, it’s on the internet so scraping your stuff and violating your copyright is totally legal you guys!”? Well, what about when you’re using Word, installed on your own PC, to write private documents, containing, say, sensitive health information? Or detailed plans about your company’s competitor to Azure or Microsoft Office? Or correspondence with lawyers about an antirust lawsuit against Microsoft? Or a report on Microsoft’s illegal activity you’re trying to report as a whistleblower? Is that stuff fair game for the gobbledygook generators too?

This “AI” nonsense has to stop. How is any of this even remotely legal?

Using (only) a Linux terminal for my personal computing in 2024 24 Nov 2024, 11:13 pm

A month and a bit ago, I wondered if I could cope with a terminal-only computer.

[…]

The only way to really find out was to give it a go.

My goal was to see what it was like to use a terminal-only computer for my personal computing for two weeks, and more if I fancied it.

↫ Neil’s blog

I tried to do this too, once.

Once.

Doing everything from the terminal just isn’t viable for me, mostly because I didn’t grow up with it. Our family’s first computer ran MS-DOS (with a Windows 3.1 installation we never used), and I’m pretty sure the experience of using MS-DOS as my first CLI ruined me for life. My mental model for computing didn’t start forming properly until Windows 95 came out, and as such, computing is inherently graphical for me, and no matter how many amazing CLI and TUI applications are out there – and there are many, many amazing ones – my brain just isn’t compatible with it.

There are a few tasks I prefer doing with the command line, like updating my computers or editing system files using Nano, but for everything else I’m just faster and more comfortable with a graphical user interface. This comes down to not knowing most commands by heart, and often not even knowing the options and flags for the most basic of commands, meaning even very basic operations that people comfortable using the command line do without even thinking, take me ages.

I’m glad any modern Linux distribution – I use Fedora KDE on all my computers – offers both paths for almost anything you could do on your computer, and unless I specifically opt to do so, I literally – literally literally – never have to touch the command line.

MaXX Interactive Desktop springs back to life with new release and updated roadmap 24 Nov 2024, 1:22 am

I had to dive into our archive all the way back to 2017 to find the last reference to the MaXX Interactive Desktop, and it seems this wasn’t exactly my fault – the project has been on hiatus since 2020, and is only now coming back to life, as MaXXdesktop v2.2.0 (nickname Octane) Alpha-1 has been released, alongside a promising and ambitious roadmap for the future of the project. For the uninitiated – MaXX is a Linux reimplementation of the IRIX Interactive Desktop with some modernisations and other niceties to make it work properly on modern Linux (and FreeBSD) machines.

MaXX has a unique history in that its creator and lead developer, Eric Masson, managed to secure a special license agreement with SGI way back in 2005, under which he was allowed to recreate, from scratch, the IRIX Interactive Desktop on Linux, including the use of SGI’s trademarks and IRIX’ unique look and feel. It’s important to note that he did not get access to any code – he was only allowed to reverse-engineer and recreate it, and because some of the code falls under this license agreement and some doesn’t, MaXX is not entirely open source; parts of it are, but not all of it. Any new code written that doesn’t fall under the license agreement is released as open source though, and the goal is to, over time, make everything open source.

And as you can tell from this v2.2.0 screenshot, MaXX looks stunning even at 4K.

This new alpha version contains the first changes to adopt the freedesktop.org application specifications, a new Exposé-like window overview, tweaks to the modernised version of the IRIX look and feel (the classic one is also included as an option), desktop notifications, performance improvements, various modernisations to the window manager, and so, so much more. For the final release of 2.2.0 and later releases, more changes are planned, like brand new configuration and system management panels, a quick search tool, a new file manager, and a ton more.

MaXX runs on RHEL/Rocky and Ubuntu, and probably more Linux distributions, and FreeBSD, and is entirely free.

The rare POWER Indigo 2 23 Nov 2024, 10:22 am

This is a Silicon Graphics workstation from 1995. Specifically, it is an ‘Teal’ Indigo 2 (as opposed to a ‘Purple’ Indigo 2, which came later). Ordinarily that’s rare enough – these things were about £30,000 brand new. A close look at the case badge though, marks this out as a ‘Teal’ POWER Indigo 2 – where instead of the usual MIPS R4600 or R4400SC CPU modules, we have the rare, unusual, expensive and short-lived MIPS R8000 module.

↫ Jonathan Pallant

It’s rare these days to find an article about exotic hardware that has this many detailed photographs – most people just default to making videos now. Even if the actual contents of the article aren’t interesting, this is some real good hardware pornography, and I salute the author for taking the time to both take and publish these photos in a traditional way. That being said, what makes this particular SGI Indigo 2 so special?

The R8000 is not a CPU in the traditional sense. It is a processor, but that processor is comprised of many individual chips, some of which you can see and some of which are hidden under the heatsink.

The MIPS R8000 was apparently an attempt to wrestle back the Floating-Point crown from rivals. Some accounts report that at 75 MHz, it has around ten times the double-precision floating point throughput of an equivalent Pentium. However, code had to be specially optimised to take best advantage of it and most code wasn’t. It lasted on the market for around 18 months, before bring replaced by the MIPS R10K in the ‘Purple’ Indigo 2.

↫ Jonathan Pallant

And here we see the first little bits of writing on the wall for the future of all the architectures trying to combat the rising tide of x86. SGI’s MIPS, Sun’s SPARC, HP’s PA-RISC, and other processors would stumble along for a few more years after this R8000 module came on the market, but looking back, all of these companies knew which way the wind was blowing, and many of them would sign onto Intel’s Itanium effort. Itanium would fail spectacularly, but the cat was out of the bag, and SGI, Sun, and HP would all be making standard Xeon and Opteron workstations within a a few years.

Absolutely amazing to see this rare of a machine and module lovingly looked after.

Introduction to Bismuth VM 23 Nov 2024, 9:38 am

This is the first post in what will hopefully become a series of posts about a virtual machine I’m developing as a hobby project called Bismuth. This post will touch on some of the design fundamentals and goals, with future posts going into more detail on each.

But to explain how I got here I first have to tell you about Bismuth, the kernel.

↫ Eniko Fox

It’s not every day the a developer of an awesome video game details a project they’re working on that also happens to be excellent material for OSNews. Eniko Fox, one of the developers of the recently released Kitsune Tails, has also been working on an operating system and virtual machine in her spare time, and has recently been detailing the experience in, well, more detail. This one here is the first article in the series, and a few days ago she published the second part about memory safety in the VM.

The first article goes into the origins of the project, as well as the design goals for the virtual machine. It started out as an operating systems development side project, but once it was time to develop things like the MMU and virtual memory mapping, Fox started wondering if programs couldn’t simply run inside a virtual machine atop the kernel instead. This is how the actual Bismuth virtual machine was conceived.

Fox wants the virtual machine to care about memory safety, and that’s what the second article goes into. Since the VM is written in C, which is anything but memory-safe, she’s opting for implementing a form of sandboxing – which also happens to be the point in the development story where my limited knowledge starts to fail me and things get a little too complicated for me. I can’t even internalise how links work in Markdown, after all (square or regular brackets first? Also Markdown sucks as a writing tool but that’s a story for another time).

For those of you more capable than me – so basically most of you – Fox’ series is a great series to follow along as she further develops the Bismuth VM.

What’s in a Steam Deck kernel anyway? 23 Nov 2024, 9:14 am

Valve, entirely going against the popular definition of Vendor[pejorative], is still actively working on improving and maintaining the kernel for their Steam Deck hardware. Let’s see what they’re up to in this 6.8 cycle.

↫ Samuel Dionne-Riel

Just a quick look at what, exactly, Valve does with the Steam Deck Linux kernel – nothing more, nothing less. It’s nice to have simple, straightforward posts sometimes.

Linux to lose support for Apple and IBM’s failed PowerPC Common Hardware Reference Platform 21 Nov 2024, 12:09 am

Ah, the Common Hardware Reference Platform, IBM’s and Apple’s ill-fated attempt at taking on the PC market with a reference PowerPC platform anybody could build and expand upon while remaining (mostly) compatible with one another. Sadly, like so many other things Apple was trying to do before Steve Jobs returned, it never took off, and even Apple itself never implemented CHRP in any meaningful way. Only a few random IBM and Motorola computers ever fully implemented it, and Apple didn’t get any further than basic CHRP support in Mac OS 8, and some PowerPC Macs were based on CHRP, without actually being compatible with it.

We’re roughly three decades down the line now, and pretty much everyone except weird nerds like us have forgotten CHRP was ever even a thing, but Linux has continued to support CHRP all this time. This support, too, though, is coming to an end, as Michael Ellerman has informed the Linux kernel community that they’re thinking of getting rid of it. Only a very small number of machines are supported by CHRP in Linux: the IBM B50, bplan/Genesi’s Pegasos/Pegasos2 boards, the Total Impact briQ, and maybe some Motorola machines, and that’s it. Ellerman notes that these machines seem to have zero active users, and anyone wanting to bring CHRP support back can always go back in the git history.

CHRP is one of the many, many footnotes in computing history, and with so few machines out there that supported it, and so few machines Linux’ CHRP support could even be used for, it makes perfect sense to remove this from the kernel, while obviously keeping it in git’s history in case anyone wants to work with it on their hardware in the future. Still, it’s always fun to see references to such old, obscure hardware and platforms in 2024, even if it’s technically sad news.

Microsoft pushes full-screen ads for Copilot+ PCs on Windows 10 users 20 Nov 2024, 11:53 pm

Windows 10’s free, guaranteed security updates stop in October 2025, less than a year from now. Windows 10 users with supported PCs have been offered the Windows 11 upgrade plenty of times before. But now Microsoft is apparently making a fresh push to get users to upgrade, sending them full-screen reminders recommending they buy new computers.

↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica

That deadline sure feels like it’s breathing down Microsoft’s neck. Most Windows users are still using Windows 10, and all of those hundreds of millions (billions?) of computers will become unsupported less than a year from now, which is going to be a major headache for Microsoft once the unaddressed security issues start piling up. CrowdStrike is fresh in Microsoft’s minds, and the company made a ton of promises about changing its security culture and implementing new features and best practices to stop it from ever happening again. That’s going to be some very tough promises to keep when the majority of Windows users are no longer getting any support.

The obvious solution here is to accept the fact that if people haven’t upgraded to Windows 11 by now, they’re not going to until forced to do so because their computer breaks or becomes too slow and Windows 11 comes preinstalled on their new computer. No amount of annoying fullscreen ads interrupting people’s work or pleasure are going to get people to buy a new PC just for some halfbaked “AI” nonsense or whatever – in fact, it might just put even more people off from upgrading in the first place.

Microsoft needs to face the music and simply extend the end-of-support deadline for Windows 10. Not doing so is massively irresponsible to a level rarely seen from big tech, and if they refuse to do so I strongly believe authorities should get involved and force the company to extend the deadline. You simply cannot leave this many users with insecure, non-maintained operating systems that they rely on every day to get their work done.

OpenVMS V9.2-3 released 20 Nov 2024, 11:41 pm

VMS Software, the company migrating OpenVMS to x86 (well, virtualised x86, at least) has announced the release of OpenVMS 9.2-3, which brings with a number of new features and changes. It won’t surprise you to hear that many of the changes are about virtualisation and enterprise networking stuff, like adding passthrough support for fibre channel when running OpenVMS in VMware, a new VGA/keyboard-based guest console, automatic configuration of TCP/IP and OpenSSH during installation, improved performance for virtualised network interfaces on VMware and KVM, and much more.

Gaining access to OpenVMS requires requesting a community license, after which OpenVMs will be delivered in the form of a preinstalled virtual disk image, complete with a number of development tools.