Run Linux inside a PDF file via a RISC-V emulator
You might expect PDF files to only be comprised of static documents, but surprisingly, the PDF file format supports Javascript with its own separate standard library. Modern browsers (Chromium, Firefox) implement this as part of their PDF engines. However, the APIs that are available in the browser are much more limited. The full specfication for the JS in PDFs was only ever implemented by Adobe Acrobat, and it contains some ridicul … ⌘ Read more

The GNU Guix System
GNU Guix is a package manager for GNU/Linux systems. It is designed to give users more control over their general-purpose and specialized computing environments, and make these easier to reproduce over time and deploy to one or many devices. ↫ GNU Guix website Guix is basically GNU’s approach to a reproducible, functional package manager, very similar to Nix because, well, it’s based on Nix. GNU also has a Linux distribution built around Nix, the GNU Guix System, which is fully ‘libre’ as al … ⌘ Read more

cli/q: 🌱 A simple programming language. - q - Projects I really like this little q lang that Ed has created ❤️ Really nice and simpler, great design and implementation and really lovely cross-platform compiler supporting DOS, Windows, Darwin and Linux on AMD64 and ARM64 💪

Android 16’s Linux Terminal will soon let you run graphical apps, so of course we ran Doom
Regardless, the fact that Android’s Linux Terminal can run graphical apps like Doom now is good news. Hopefully we’ll be able to run more complex desktop-class Linux programs in the future. I tried running GIMP, for example, but it didn’t work. Eventually, Android should be able to run Linux apps as well as Chromebooks can, as I believe one of the goals … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.14 with Rust: “We are almost at the ‘write a real driver in Rust’ stage now”
With the Linux 6.13 kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman described the level of Rust support as a “tipping point” for Rust drivers with more of the Rust infrastructure having been merged. Now for the Linux 6.14 kernel, Greg describes the state of the Rust driver possibilities as “almost at the “write a real driver in rust” stage now, depending on what you want to do.“ ↫ Michael … ⌘ Read more

Ahh yes, what I like to call “wild wild west” upgrading.😂
Felt like that when I upgraded/updated an Arch Linux machine that had been sitting for a couple years unused.

AI bots paralyze Linux news site and others
Apparently, since the beginning of the year, AI bots have been ensuring that websites can only respond to regular inquiries with a delay. The founder of Linux Weekly News (LWN-net), Jonathan Corbet, reports that the news site is therefore often slow to respond. The AI scraper bots cause a DDoS, a distributed denial-of-service attack. At times, the AI bots would clog the lines with hundreds of IP addresses simultaneously as soon as they decided … ⌘ Read more

When a sole maintainer steps down, Linux drivers become orphans
The Linux kernel has become such an integral, core part of pretty much all aspects of the technology world, and corporate contributions to the kernel make up such a huge chunk of the kernel’s ongoing development, it’s easy to forget that some parts of the kernel are still maintained by some lone person in Jacksonville, Nebraska, or whatever. Sadly, we were reminded of this today when the sole maintainer of … ⌘ Read more

Took today off work. My workplace has a special form of leave called “My Day” that you can take in addition to your usual Annual leave. So nice! 😊 I’m using one of them today to take advantage of the long weekend coming up (Australia Day). Planning on making repairs to one of my Hypervisor nodes that is currently down and powered off for repairs. The SATA DOM (Disk on Module) boot disk is kind of dead and the controller refusing to take any new writes. It’s about ~5 years old 🤣

Plan is to take the machine out of the Rack, place it on my office desk to open it up. Plug in a new 2nd SATA DOM on another SAtA cable. Boot it back up with a Linux Rescue bootable ISO and do a dd of the old to the new. Then swap ‘em around and hope 🤞 for the best 😅

Linux 6.13 released
Linux 6.13 comes with the introduction of the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for benefiting multi-CCD Ryzen X3D processors, the new AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” server processors will now default to AMD P-State rather than ACPI CPUFreq for better power efficiency, the start of Intel Xe3 graphics bring-up, support for many older (pre-M1) Apple devices like numerous iPads and iPhones, NVMe 2.1 specification support, and AutoFDO and Propeller optimization support when compiling the Linux kernel with … ⌘ Read more

Another infrastructure apocalypse day at work. Linux and Windows users were unable to reach M$ services. No Outlook, no Teams, no intranet (Sharepoint), no Azure, etc. Mac users were lucky, though. Took whoever the whole day to resolve that. Shortly before I called it quits, it worked again. I haven’t read any e-mail today, used Teams mostly on the company phone, but it’s the plague.

And as I’ve forseen the other day, we have to deliver yet another workaround hotfix, once the other team eventually gets their stuff integrated that we should rely on. Good riddance it’s the weekend now!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, what else does one need? 😅

I added more instructions, made it portable (so it runs on my own OS as well as Linux/DOS/whatever), and the assembler is now good enough to be used in the build process to compile the bootloader:

Image

That is pretty cool. 😎

It’s still a “naive” assembler. There are zero optimizations and it can’t do macros (so I had to resort to using cpp). Since nothing is optimized, it uses longer opcodes than NASM and that makes the bootloader 11 bytes too large. 🥴 I avoided that for now by removing some cosmetic output from the bootloader.

been thinking about trying arch linux but no i will not become the type of person that uses arch

just spent like half an hour finding a terminal based color picker that would just. turn the cursor into a cross hair and let me pick from the screen. in linux fashion this was somehow difficult

good morning everyone i want to do epic linux desktop ricing again

After taking a short break for Christmas business, I’ve worked on my little toy operating system for the 8086 again.

It understands the basics of FAT12 now. I’ve actually never sat down before to learn how FAT works. 🤦 Well, better late than never, I guess.

It can’t do subdirectories nor timestamps and I probably won’t implement that. One flat directory is good enough for my purposes and the OS has no notion of time, yet, anyway.

It’s really cool to be able to exchange files with the Linux host or other DOS VMs. 🥳

https://movq.de/v/21e91bafdb/los86-fat12.mp4

Unmasking the hidden gems of Void Linux https://animeshz.github.io/site/blogs/void-linux.html

@movq@www.uninformativ.de my util-linux 2.40.2 version of cal seems to do week 53.

Image

Showing my nephew around linux… and what’s a better example of text editing in terminal than an actual twt? eh? 😆

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Mostly small and simple stuff, like cable management, headphone rests, pill dispensers (that I didn’t end up using), … The most elaborate thing I made was that contraption for my keyboard, which is a bit hard to explain right now, so here’s some photos:

Image

Image

I didn’t end up using that, either. 🥴

In general, I print very little. So little that some of my supplies have simply gone bad, like that “3D LAC” (sprayable glue).

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Yeah, I saw that when googling the issue. I’m on Linux, there are no DLLs to swap. I could use an older version indeed. 🤔 Let’s see if I can find some better alternative first. (Let’s face it, Blender is hard to use.)

Always a great feeling when you can solve npm install problems by simply copying over the whole node_modules folder from your own (linux) machine. One of the benefits of developing on a Linux machine I suppose.

@discoverbsdthebsdcommunitylinklog@feeds.twtxt.net This is interesting. Not giving up on #FreeBSD #jails yet but definitely have to give this a try; and if my #podman workflow goes as smooth as it does on #Linux I might just end up installing FreeBSD on the #RaspberryPi too! 🥳

Fuck me dead, what a giant piece of shit. On my Linux work laptop I have the problem that some unknown snakeoil “security” junk is dropping any IPv4 connections to ports 80 and 443. All other ports and IPv6 seem unaffected. I get an immediate “connection refused” when trying to estabslish a connection.

I had this problem four weeks ago on Friday morning the very first time at home. On Thursday evening, everything was perfectly fine. Eventually, I plugged in the LAN cable in the office and everything got automatically fixed. Nobody can explain what’s happening.

Then, last week Friday morning out of the blue, the same issue was back. So, I went to the office yesterday and it got fixed again by plugging in the network cable. This evening, I have exactly the same bloody problem again.

What the hell is going on? Does anyone have any ideas? I’m certainly not an expert, but I don’t see anything suspicious in iptables or nft rules. I also do not see anything showing up in /var/log/kern.log. Even tried to stop firewalld, flush the iptables and nft rules, but that didn’t result in any changes.

Can someone try Alpine Linux with XFCE and Compiz please? Show me how the full screen zoom works in 2024/2025 🙏

@bender@twtxt.net The tagline of Timeline is “a single user twtxt/yarn pod” not just a yarn pod. Similar to GNU/Linux. When we came up with the concept of Yarn Social it was a way to rebrand twtxt with the extensions that makes conversations like this possible.

@bender@twtxt.net Linux and Android. I would never iOS my friend.

@off_grid_living@twtxt.net is it locked because of a DRM thing or something else?

Otherwise you can check if you already have the pdftotext command that comes with the poppler-utils package, try converting converting the pdf into a text file and copy to your heart’s content. I have just tried it myself.

If you don’t have it already here’s what you can do on Ubuntu or any Debian based distribution of Linux:

• Update and upgrade your packages:
  > sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
  
• Install the poppler-utils package
  > sudo apt install poppler-utils
  
• Now you can convert your pdf to txt file with:
  > pdftotxt -layout -enc UTF-8 name_of_source_file.pdf name_of_destination_file.txt
  

You can always do a pdftotxt --help to see the rest of possible options.
Hope this helps.

no but linux containers aren’t secure. yeah, they’re administrative boundaries. a sandbox would be nice, but this isn’t Sun. we have fallen from grace. tape the box closed with AppArmor if you need to and flip the exact 11 switches that apply for your impending scenario. i’m sure nobody will steal your data.

Image

OK I found this one, small enough, but where does it install to? can’t find the app, of any files of anything.
Being a total novice to Linux stuff….where is this file located and why don’t they prompt you for a folder location of the program? And why such a stupid name? Dozens to choose from and most over 300MB, not what I want - I just want Apache to run the index.html webpage or the index.php webpage. I do not need Javascript or Java programming editors….

Another minor inconvenience could have been avoided by reading the Arch Linux news feed before upgrading.

… So it’s gonna be either a:

• Find a way to do a Chroot install a la Chad Arch Linux way, on a portion of the disk space while I’m Ssh-ing in and then whip out the old debian installation if all goes well.
  
• or a YOLO automated/unattended install.
  

Either way, I’m ready to deal with the eff up! Because I’ve never done none of that before… 😂

https://oper.io/?p=linux:non-root-suspend

and you can even mount it on windows/linux/os x!

Image

Sad to see moc removed from the official arch linux repos, but also cool to learn the debian project has been quietly patching it and keeping it up to date in recent years. Long live the music on console player. (And debian!) :-)

I finally found the NASM assembler.

https://nasm.us/index.php

I had heard that name before, many times, but somehow never looked into it. Weird. 🤨🤔

This is the kind of program I was looking for.

1. It is free software. Especially in the DOS ecosystem, free/libre software is a very scarce resource.
   
2. It’s a small command line program, not a huge behemoth.
   
3. Documentation appears to be well written.
   
4. It can even cross-compile DOS binaries from Linux.

Linus Torvalds Has ‘Robust Exchanges’ Over Filesystem Suggestion on Linux Kernel Mailing List
Linus Torvalds had “some robust exchanges” on the Linux kernel mailing list with a contributor from Google. The subject was inodes, notes the Register, “which as Red Hat puts it are each ‘a unique identifier for a specific piece of metadata on a given filesystem.’”

Inodes have been the subj … ⌘ Read more

Voidlinux post install : https://kennydodrill.com/blog/stable-void-linux-setup-guide/

My linux installs all have TPM enabled. …

Note pour plus tard : tester une simple install arch linux + DWM. Archolinux ou bare install ?

Note pour plus tard : tester une simple install arch linux + DWM. Archolinux ou bare install ?

Printing pictures on Linux is still a bit of a challenge.

Scientist Claims Quantum RSA-2048 Encryption Cracking Breakthrough
Mark Tyson reports via Tom’s Hardware: A commercial smartphone or Linux computer can be used to crack RSA-2048 encryption, according to a prominent research scientist. Dr Ed Gerck is preparing a research paper with the details but couldn’t hold off from bragging about his incredible quantum computing achievement (if true) on his LinkedIn profil … ⌘ Read more

Since I have these simple, yet effective bash shell commands, which allow me to edit notes, plans, todos and statuses from the terminal, I feel liberated from overly complex software - everything is just text files and applications which come preinstalled on every Linux system.

Anyone have any ideas how you might identify processes (pids) on Linux machine that are responsible for most of the Disk I/O on that machine and subsequently causing high I/O wait times for other processes? 🤔

Important bit: The machine has no access to the internet, there are hardly any standard tools on it, etc. So I have to get something to it “air gapped”. I have terminal access to it, so I can do interesting things like, base64 encode a static binary to my clipboard and paste it to a file, then base64 decode it and execute. That’s about the only mechanisms I have.

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah, it’s true. Thing is, Linux as a desktop operating system sucked in 1996 yet I adopted it then anyway because I wanted nothing to do with MS anymore 😆 I know it’s not for everyone but I’m pretty tolerant of a less-than-stellar experience if it means I can be free of big-company garbage.

I haven’t tried a Linux-based smartphone OS in a long time so I don’t have any idea how bad/good it might be. I figure when I finally break down and get a new phone I’ll experiment on my current phone.

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net F-droid. Getting APKs from developers you trust and side-loading them. Some flavor of Linux. Some distro of the open source parts of Android.

There are lots of options. Bit by bit I divest from anything that’s distributed from Google Play. With my latest phone I find and download APKs so that I could have the app without all the Google crap woven through it. By the time I need to replace this one I’ll be fully free of Google Play. Most of my apps come from F-droid now. You can a perfectly functional phone/pocket computer unless you’re addicted to installing dozens of corporate apps.

@mckinley@twtxt.net Yes, I’m still with jmp.chat, and still very happy with them overall. Their beta period ended and their pricing increased a bit, so that’s worth a bit of consideration. I also managed to get one of their eSIMs. I’m slightly less happy with that aspect of their service, though they seem to be actively working on improving it and I knew in advance this was an early beta kind of thing and likely to have issues.

The only unreliability with calls that I’ve noticed was traceable to the unreliability of my own internet connection. I’ve confused incoming calls by simultaneously making and taking calls from the computer and the phone, but I think it’s understandable that problems might arise and that’s not a real use case for me. Once or twice I did not receive a text transcription of a voice mail, but the support is usually quick to address things like that.

I host my own XMPP server and have for a good decade now, and that’s what I use with jmp.chat. I can’t speak to the quality of their hosting options.

Group texting works fine for me if one of the other parties initiates the group text. I haven’t tried to initiate my own group text in well over a year; last time I did, it didn’t work. That may or may not be a problem for you, and it may or may not have been fixed by now. Worth investigating more if it’s important. I should also say I’ve only ever used group texts with 3 participants, and can’t speak to what happens if there are more nor whether there are upper limits.

Group texts don’t use MUC. Rather, they use a special syntax in the JID, something like “+1XXX,+1YYY,…,+1ZZZ@cheogram.com”, where the + and , are required, the XXX, YYY, through ZZZ are the phone numbers (no dashes or other special chars just digits), and the @cheogram.com at the end is required.

I recommend the cheogram app if you’re on android. It has a lot of nice features on top of the Conversations base. I use gajim on my (linux) computer and it works well with jmp.chat.

I’m happy to answer other questions if you have them!

@prologic@twtxt.net It was super useful if you needed to do the sorts of things it did. I’m pretty sad.

At its core was Sage, a computational mathematics system, and their own version of Jupyter notebooks. So, you could do all kinds of different math stuff in a notebook environment and share that with people. But on top of that, there was a chat system, a collaborative editing system, a course management system (so if you were teaching a class using it you could keep track of students, assignments, grades, that sort of thing), and a bunch of other stuff I never used. It all ran in a linux container with python/conda as a base, so you could also drop to a terminal, install stuff in the container, and run X11 applications in the same environment. I never taught a class with it but I used to use it semi-regularly to experiment with ideas.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de
Doesn’t even compile on my system, which is apparently broken:

> cc -Wall -Wextra -o win win.c $(pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk4)                                                                                                        
cc: error: unrecognized argument in option ‘-mfpmath=sse -msse -msse2 -pthread -I/usr/include/gtk-4.0 -I/usr/include/gio-unix-2.0 -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/harfbuzz -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/fribidi -I/usr/include/harfbuzz -I/usr/include/gdk-pixbuf-2.0 -I/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/pixman-1 -I/usr/include/uuid -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/libpng16 -I/usr/include/graphene-1.0 -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/graphene-1.0/include -I/usr/include/libmount -I/usr/include/blkid -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/include -lgtk-4 -lpangocairo-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lharfbuzz -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lcairo-gobject -lcairo -lgraphene-1.0 -lgio-2.0 -lgobject-2.0 -lglib-2.0’
cc: note: valid arguments to ‘-mfpmath=’ are: 387 387+sse 387,sse both sse sse+387 sse,387

I have used Linux for most my life, and it hat been my daily driver for nearly two decades now. I have been bugged recently how when I exit the terminal buffer has not been cleared leaving whatever contents available to the next user to view.

a quick man zsh I found the STARTUP/SHUTDOWN FILES, and then a quick search on resetting the termianl buffer led me to <esc>c or printf "\033c".

In five minutes something which has bothered me for who knows how long was resolved. Just needed some motivation to figure it out.