I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴

Apple killed Asahi Linux with M4 update
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Windows 9x QuickInstall simplifies installing Windows 98
If you’re elbow-deep in ’90s retrocomputing and maintain a fleet of your own personal seemingly identical but definitely completely different Windows 98 machines, Windows 9x QuickInstall is tailor-made just for you. It takes the root file system of an already installed Windows 98 system and packages it, whilst allowing drivers and tools to be slipstreamed at will. For the installer, it uses Linux as a base, paired with … ⌘ Read more

I’m playing with ratterplatter again: It’s a toy that watches disk I/O and emulates the noise of a real hard disk. (Linux only.) It uses sound samples from one of my older disks.

I tried a different approach at estimating the disk activity and I think I finally got it right (after almost 10 years … 🤦).

Demo, booting a Windows 2000 VM: https://movq.de/v/1400544cc6/2kboot-ratterplatter-2.mp4

(For this purpose alone, I put a couple of mini speakers into my PC case, so that the noise comes from the right place: https://movq.de/v/a3b2dc0932/speakers.jpg)

The results aren’t too bad, but this thing can’t be super accurate due to the huge I/O caches that we have these days. For the video, I dropped the caches before booting Windows, otherwise you would have heard almost nothing.

FWIW, if you don’t know it yet, this is the equivalent for proper keyboard sound: https://github.com/zevv/bucklespring

Nova Custom: this week’s sponsor
Nova Custom, based in The Netherlands, makes laptops focused on privacy, customisation, and freedom. Nova Custom laptops ship with either Linux, Windows, or no operating system, and they’re uniquely certified for Qubes OS (the V54 model will be certified soon), the ultra-secure and private operating system. On top of that, Nova Custom laptops come with Dasharo coreboot firmware preinstalled, which is completely open source, instead of a proprietary BIOS. Nova Custom c … ⌘ Read more

Manjaro Linux: Making Arch Linux More Accessible
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Nvidia Linux GPU driver ported to Haiku
Nvidia releasing its Linux graphics driver as open source is already bearing fruit for alternative operating systems. As many people already knows, Nvidia published their kernel driver under MIT license: GitHub – NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules: NVIDIA Linux open GPU kernel module source (I will call it NVRM). This driver is very portable and its platform-independent part can be compiled for Haiku with minor effort (but it need to implement OS-specific … ⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Using full-blown Cloud services is good for old people like me who don’t want to do on-call duty when a disk fails. 😂 I like sleep! 😂

Jokes aside, I like IaaS as a middle ground. There are IaaS hosters who allow you to spin up VMs as you wish and connect them in a network as you wish. You get direct access to all those Linux boxes and to a layer 2 network, so you can do all the fun networking stuff like BGP, VRRP, IPSec/Wireguard, whatever. And you never have to worry about failing disks, server racks getting full, cable management, all that. 😅

I’m confident that we will always need people who do bare-bones or “low-level” stuff instead of just click some Cloud service. I guess that smaller companies don’t use Cloud services very often (because it’s way too expensive for them).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de ancient……. i love old linux it’s so janky

After 47 years, OpenVMS gets a package manager
As of the 18th of February, OpenVMS, known for its stability and high-availability, 47 years old and ported to 4 different CPU architecture, has a package manager! This article shows you how to use the package manager and talks about a few of its quirks. It’s an early beta version, and you do notice that when using it. A small list of things I noticed, coming from a Linux (apt/yum/dnf) background: There seems to be no automatic dependency … ⌘ Read more

wahhh i wanna work towards my dream of offering pay as you can web hosting (static & dynamic) but i don’t know how!!!!! i keep drifting towards hosting panels but i don’t exactly have fresh linux servers for those nor do i like the level of access they require. so i’m like ok i can do the static site part with SFTP chroot jails and a front-end like filebrowser or something…. but then what about the dynamic sites!!!!!!! UGH

granted i doubt i’d get much interest in dynamic sites but i’d like to do this old school where i can offer people isolated mySQL databases or something for some project (i’m thinking PHP based fanlistings), which means i could do it the old school way of… people ask me to run it and i do it for them. but i kind of want to let people have access to be able to do it themselves just short of giving them SSH access which isn’t happening

Ubuntu to replace classic coreutils and more with new Rust-based alternatives
After so much terrible tech politics news, let’s focus on some nice, easy-going Linux news that’s not going to be controversial at all: Ubuntu intends to replace numerous core Linux utilities with newer Rust replacements, starting with the ubiquitous GNU Coreutils. This package provides utilities which have become synonymous with Linux to many – the likes of ls, cp, and mv. In … ⌘ Read more

Chimera Linux drops RISC-V support because capable RISC-V hardware doesn’t exist
We’ve talked about Chimera Linux a few times now on OSNews, so I won’t be repeating what makes it unique once more. The project announced today that it will be shuttering its RISC-V architecture support, and considering RISC-V has been supported by Chimera Linux pretty much since the beginning, this is a big step. The reason is as sad as it is predictable: there’s simply n … ⌘ Read more

Exploring the (discontinued) hybrid Debian GNU/kFreeBSD distribution
For decades, Linux and BSD have stood as two dominant yet fundamentally different branches of the Unix-like operating system world. While Linux distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora, have grown to dominate the open-source ecosystem, BSD-based systems like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD have remained the preferred choice for those seeking security, performance, and licensing flexibility. … ⌘ Read more

Comparing Fuchsia components and Linux containers
Fuchsia is a new (non-Linux) operating system from Google, and one of the key pieces of Fuchsia’s design is the component framework. Components on Fuchsia have many similarities with some of the container solutions on Linux (such as Docker): they both fetch content addressed blobs from the network, assemble those blobs into an isolated filesystem structure that holds all the dependencies necessary to run some piece of software, and … ⌘ Read more

Hacer software código opensource es desafiante y paulatinamente desgasta a su autor. Todo comienza con pasión y entusiasmo, por supuesto. Si logras repercusión, te enfrentas a una carrera de fondo que muchos terminan abandonando por las demandas constantes de usuarios que, a menudo, no valoran el trabajo ni contribuyen de manera significativa. Por mencionar un caso reciente: Hector Martin. Líder del proyecto Asahi Linux, quien dedicó años a adaptar Linux para los procesadores Apple Silicon, un logro técnico impresionante. Sin embargo, terminó renunciando debido a la presión de usuarios que exigían soporte y mejoras como si fueran clientes pagos.

La mayoría de los mantenedores no reciben ningún soporte económico. Solo unos pocos proyectos logran sostenibilidad financiera a través de patrocinios, mientras que la mayoría de los desarrolladores terminan con un segundo empleo no remunerado.

Sin un cambio en la forma en que se valora y apoya los proyectos Opensource, y no solo hablo de las grandes empresas multimillonarias. Sería una perdida para todos si acabaremos con un ecosistema de software archivado y abandonado.

Ahora te paso la pelota a ti, ¿cuando fue la última vez que apoyaste a un mantenedor de software opensource?

#opensource #software #sostenibilidad

Netboot Windows 11 with iSCSI and iPXE
For the past several years my desktop has also had a disk dedicated to maintaining a Windows install. I’d prefer to use the space in my PC case for disks for Linux. Since I already run a home NAS, and my Windows usage is infrequent, I wondered if I could offload the Windows install to my NAS instead. This lead me down the course of netbooting Windows 11 and writing up these notes on how to do a simplified “modern” version. ↫ Terin Stock The setup Terin S … ⌘ Read more

A love letter to Void Linux
I installed Void on my current laptop on the 10th of December 2021, and there has never been any reinstall. The distro is absurdly stable. It’s a rolling release, and yet, the worst update I had in those years was one time, GTK 4 apps took a little longer to open on GNOME. Which was reverted after a few hours. Not only that, I sometimes spent months without any update, and yet, whenever I did update, absolutely nothing went wrong. Granted, I pretty much only did full upgrades … ⌘ Read more

NES86: x86 emulation on the NES
The goal of this project is to emulate an Intel 8086 processor and supporting PC hardware well enough to run the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS), including a shell and utilities. It should be possible to run other x86 software as long as it doesn’t require more than a simple serial terminal. ↫ NES86 GitHub page Is this useful in any meaningful sense? No. Will this change the word? No. Does it have any other purpose than just being fun and cool? Nope. None of that … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I also thought that I have a new Linux friend the other day. But it was just a fake KDE look from Redmond. :-(

Oasis: a small, statically-linked Linux system
You might think the world of Linux distributions is a rather boring, settled affair, but there’s actually a ton of interesting experimentation going on in the Linux world. From things like NixOS with its unique packaging framework, to the various immutable distributions out there like the Fedora Atomic editions, there’s enough uniqueness to go around to find a lid for every pot. Oasis Linux surely falls into this category. One of its main … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD and hi-fi audio setup: bit-perfect, equalizer, real-time
A complete guide to configuring FreeBSD as an audiophile audio server: setting up system and audio subsystem parameters, real-time operation, bit-perfect signal processing, and the best methods for enabling and parameterising the system graphic equalizer (equalizer) and high-quality audio equalization with FFmpeg filters. Linux users will also find useful information, especially in the context of configuri … ⌘ Read more

MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0 released
Late last year, the MaXX Interactive Desktop, the Linux (and BSD) version of the IRIX desktop, sprung back to life with a new release and a detailed roadmap. Thanks to a unique licensing agreement with SGI, MaXX’ developer, Eric Masson, has been able to bring a lot of the SGI user experience over to Linux and BSD, and as promised, we have a new release: the final version of MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0. It’s codenamed Octane, and anyone who knows the … ⌘ Read more

TuxTape: a kernel livepatching solution
Geico, an American insurance company, is building a live-patching solution for the Linux kernel, called TuxTape. TuxTape is an in-development kernel livepatching ecosystem that aims to aid in the production and distribution of kpatch patches to vendor-independent kernels. This is done by scraping the Linux CNA mailing list, prioritizing CVEs by severity, and determining applicability of the patches to the configured kernel(s). Applicability of patches i … ⌘ Read more

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:

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.

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:

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.