I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:

https://movq.de/v/56feb53912/s.png

https://movq.de/v/235c1eabac/MVI_8810.MOV.mp4

The biiiiiiiiiig problem is that the print head and plastic cover make it impossible to see what’s currently being printed, because this is not a typewriter. This means: In order to see what I just entered, I have to feed the paper back and forth and back and forth … it’s not ideal.

I got that idea of moving back/forth from Drew DeVault, who – as it turned out – did something similar a few years back. (I tried hard to read as little as possible of his blog post, because figuring things out myself is more fun. But that could mean I missed a great idea here or there.)

But hey, at least this is running on my Pentium 133 on SuSE Linux 6.4, printer connected with a parallel cable. 😍

(Also, yes, you can see the printouts of earlier tests and, yes, I used ed(1) wrong at one point. 🤪 And ls insisted on using colors …)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz yeah it’s pretty terrible these days. Most recent trouble I had was something as simple as installing and setting up the Tailscale client. On literally all my other devices (Linux and Android) that was a cinch, but on Windows…. ohh boy, I had to mess around with reg edits and all sorts of crap and eventually bludgeoned it into working, but it was a bloody pain.

Distrobox is pretty handy and kind of amazed I haven’t played with it before now. I wanted to quickly try out Proton’s Authenticator they just released, but they only had binaries for Ubuntu and Fedora (naturally), but I’m on Void Linux on this laptop.

Installed the latest basic Fedora image with Distrobox, used dnf to install the downloaded rpm file within it, and presto, running the app within Void like I’d just downloaded it though the normal repos.

(Just for fun, SuSE Linux 6.4 from ~25 years ago: https://movq.de/v/dc62d0256c/s.png )

In 1996, they came up with the X11 “SECURITY” extension:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4w548u/what_is_up_with_the_x11_security_extension/

This is what could have (eventually) solved the security issues that we’re currently seeing with X11. Those issues are cited as one of the reasons for switching to Wayland.

That extension never took off. The person on reddit wonders why – I think it’s simple: Containers and sandboxes weren’t a thing in 1996. It hardly mattered if X11 was “insecure”. If you could run an X11 client, you probably already had access to the machine and could just do all kinds of other nasty things.

Today, sandboxing is a thing. Today, this matters.

I’ve heard so many times that “X11 is beyond fixable, it’s hopeless.” I don’t believe that. I believe that these problems are solveable with X11 and some devs have said “yeah, we could have kept working on it”. It’s that people don’t want to do it:

Why not extend the X server?

Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

I’m not in a position to judge the devs. Maybe the X.Org code really is so bad that you want to run away, screaming in horror. I don’t know.

But all this was a choice. I don’t buy the argument that we never would have gotten rid of things like core fonts.

All the toolkits and programs had to be ported to Wayland. A huge, still unfinished effort. If that was an acceptable thing to do, then it would have been acceptable to make an “X12” that keeps all the good things about X11, remains compatible where feasible, eliminates the problems, and requires some clients to be adjusted. (You could have still made “X11X12” like “XWayland” for actual legacy programs.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org True, at least old versions of KDE had icons:

https://movq.de/v/0e4af6fea1/s.png

GNOME, on the other hand, didn’t, at least to my old screenshots from 2007:

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2007%2D05%2D25%2D%2Dgnome2%2Dlaptop.png

I switched to Linux in 2007 and no window manager I used since then had icons, apparently. Crazy. An icon-less existence for 18 years. (But yeah, everything is keyboard-driven here as well and there are no buttons here, either.)

Anyway, my draft is making progress:

https://movq.de/v/5b7767f245/s.png

I do like this look. 😊

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. There’s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you don’t configure it? What’s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and it’s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue
        [[ "$lddout" == *'not found'* ]] && continue
        exec "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" "$@"
done

exit 1

Preexec, okay, then some auto-detection to use a toolkit matching your desktop environment …

… and then it invokes ldd? To find out if all the required libraries are installed for the auto-detected frontend?

Oof. I was sitting here wondering why it would use pinentry-gtk on one machine and pinentry-gnome3 on another, when both machines had the exact same configs. Yeah, but different libraries were installed. One machine was missing gcr, which is needed for pinentry-gnome3, so that machine (and that one alone) spawned pinentry-gtk …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hm, I don’t think so, the requested page was a Linux-specific post. 🤔 I sometimes wonder if privacy-oriented browsers might do this on purpose, to create garbage data? 🤔 No idea.

This is it, boys and girls! The year of the Linux Desktop is this! I can smell it! :-D

For the first time, Linux has officially broken the 5% desktop market share barrier in the United States of America! It’s a huge milestone for open-source and our fantastic Linux community.

PSA: setpriv on Linux supports Landlock.

If this twt goes through, then restricting the filesystem so that jenny can only write to ~/Mail/twt, ~/www/twtxt.txt, ~/.jenny-cache, and /tmp works.

The Linux installation on my main PC turned 14 today:

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

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This wasn’t always the case, though. Quake3, Quake4, Unreal Tournament 99 and 2004 are examples of games that used to run very well as native Linux games. But that was 20+ years ago …

@movq@www.uninformativ.de reminds me how many Windows games using Proton (or WINE with similar patches) on Linux run better than some of the old native Linux binaries.

In all fairness, GOG says that Forsaken is only supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – not current Arch Linux. If you ask me, this just goes to show that Linux is not a good platform for proprietary binary software.

Is it free software, do you have the source code? Then you’re good to go, things can be patched/updated (that can still be a lot of work). But proprietary binary blobs? Very bad idea.

I bought the “remastered” versions of Grim Fandango and Forsaken on GOG, because they’re super cheap at the moment. Both have native Linux versions.

And both these Linux version crap their pants. 🫤 The bundled SDL2 of Forsaken says it “can’t find a matching GLX visual” and I couldn’t figure out how to fix that. I didn’t spend a lot of time on Grim Fandango.

Both work great in Wine. 🤦

(I do have the original version of Grim Fandango from the 1990ies, but that one does not work so well in Wine. I figured, if it’s so cheap, why not. And I now get to play the english version. 😃 The german dub is pretty damn good, actually, but I always prefer the original these days.)

Speaking of Wine, Arch Linux completely fucked up Wine for me with the latest update.

• 16-bit support is gone.
  
• Performance of 3D games is horrible and unplayable.
  

Arch is shipping a WoW64 build now, which is not yet ready for prime time.

And then I realized that there’s actually only one stable Wine release per year but Arch has been shipping development releases all the time. That’s quite unusual. I’m used to Arch only shipping stable packages … huh.

Hopefully things will improve again. I’m not eager to build Wine from source. I’d rather ditch it and resort to my real Windows XP box for the little (retro)gaming that I do … 🫤

update on tux racer: ofc it doesn’t run on modern linux LMFAOOOOOOO i’m installing red hat in a VM right now

OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

SuSE Linux 6.4 and Arachne on DOS also work (with Windows 2000 as a call target):

• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#suse-linux-64
  
• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#arachne-on-dos

@movq@www.uninformativ.de you need to get a gold chain and hang this little penguin on it, so that nobody can doubt your Linux user status.

OH MY FUCKING GOD I’M GOING TO CRY I NEED BIG TUX SO BAD https://www.steiner-plueschshop.de/kuscheltiere/arktis-seetiere/pinguin-linux/

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev

You need break the routine.

I haven’t really done that lately. 🤔 Maybe have another go at Rust (given its increasing importance in the Linux kernel)? Or Elixir, yes, I only had some very, very brief contact with it. 🤔

I just came across an old forum posting of mine about Prolog. That brought up some memories. Prolog is pretty alien, but I do miss stuff like that because it’s so different.

Just thinking out loud here. 😅

Confession:

I’ve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other “modern” social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.

The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very “ego-centric”. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).

I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great – and it didn’t even suffer from the need to federate.

Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.

On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But it’s not that great and the protocol isn’t meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of “likes” has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. ☹️

Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.4 released
The Trinity Desktop Environment, the modern-day continuation of the KDE 3.x series, has released version R14.1.4. This maintenance release brings new vector wallpapers and colour schemes, support for Unicode surrogate characters and planes above zero (for emoji, among other things), tabs in kpdf, transparency and other new visual effects for Dekorator, and much more. TDE R14.1.4 is already available for a variety of Linux distributions, and c … ⌘ Read more

io_uring based rootkit can bypass syscall-focused Linux security tools
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The wonderful world of Linux package managers
One of the strong points of Linux has always been how solid the experience of installing and managing software is. Contrarily to what happens in the Windows and macOS world, software on Linux is obtained through something called a package manager, a piece of software that manages any piece of software the user installs, as well as its dependencies, automatically. ↫ Luca Bramè at Libre.News It truly is. I can’t imagine using any operating sy … ⌘ Read more

Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE open source software report
Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE use the s390x hardware architecture to run various Linux distributions, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Ubuntu. Tens of thousands of software packages are tested and distributed through these projects, and various community distributions. ↫ Elizabeth K. Joseph at the IBM community website Various Linux distributions are available for the … ⌘ Read more

Thanks again to our outgoing sponsor: Nova Custom
We’d like to thank our outgoing sponsor, Nova Custom, for sponsoring OSNews! 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 Dasha … ⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz At the core, you need an ngircd.conf like this:

[Global]
    Name = your.irc.server.com
    Password = yourfancypassword
    Listen = 0.0.0.0
    Ports = 6667

    AdminInfo1 = Well, me.
    AdminInfo2 = Over here!
    AdminEMail = forget.it@example.invalid

[Options]
    Ident = no
    PAM = no

[SSL]
    CertFile = /etc/ssl/acme/your.irc.server.com.fullchain.pem
    KeyFile = /etc/ssl/acme/private/your.irc.server.com.key
    DHFile = /etc/ngircd/dhparam.pem
    Ports = 6669

Start it and then you can connect on port 6667. (The SSL cert/key must be managed by an external tool, probably something like certbot or acme-client.)

I’m assuming OpenBSD here. Haven’t tried it on Linux lately, let alone Docker. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Since you have to check and double check everything it spits out (without providing sources), I don’t find any of this helpful. It’s like someone’s in the room with you and that person is saying random stuff that might or might not be correct. At best, it might spark some new idea in your head and then you follow that idea the traditional way.

Information published on the internet (or anywhere, for that matter) was never guaranteed to be correct. But at least you had a “frame of reference”: “Ah, I read this information about Linux on a blog that usually posts about Windows, so this one single Linux post might not necessarily be correct.” That is completely lost with LLMs. It’s literally all mushed together. 🤷

The Art of Assembly Language
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Blue95 Topanga released with Paint and Plus! clones
Only a few weeks ago we talked about Blue95, a Fedora-based distribution focused on bringing the Windows 95 look to the Linux world by integrating a set of existing Windows 95 Xfce themes. Since Fedora 42 has just been released, the Blue95 project also pushed out a new release, called Blue95 Topanga. It brings with it all the improvements from Fedora 42, but also goes a step further be integrating new applications to further add … ⌘ Read more

What makes Slackware different?
I’m not entirely sure how to link to this properly, but what we have here is a simple, to-the-point text file describing some of the benefits of Slackware, the oldest still maintained Linux distribution. It’s still run by Patrick Volkerding, and focuses on conservative choices and simplicity over ease. I doubt I have to explain the benefits of Slackware to the average OSNews reader, but this simple little text file does serve as a great marketing tool. The fact it’s a … ⌘ Read more

Fedora change aims for 99% package reproducibility
The effort to ensure that open-source software is reproducible has been gathering steam over the years, and gaining traction with major Linux distributions. Debian, for example, has been working toward reproducible builds for more than a decade; it can now produce official live CDs of the current stable release that are reproducible. Fedora started on the path much later, but it has progressed far enough that the project is now con … ⌘ Read more

“I bought a Mac”
Yep. I regret to inform you all that, as of January 2025, I am a Mac user: I bought a Mac. I have betrayed the penguin. So, how did such an icon of early 2000s Apple fall into my grubby hands? Well, it all started with the Wii U. I’m not joking. ↫ Loganius That’s one heck of an excuse to get a PowerPC G4 – needing to do Linux kvm hacking to fix a bug. While getting the PowerMac G4 they bought all set up and working properly for development purposes, someone else fixed the bug in question in the mean … ⌘ Read more

Pinta 3.0 brings major GTK4 overhaul
Over 15 years ago, I wrote about the launch of a Paint.NET clone for Linux, called Pinta, written in GTK. That was merely version 0.1, and over time, it’s become somewhat of a staple for many Linux users. The project just released version 3, which is a major revision, moving the application over to GTK4 and Libadwaita. Built on the robust GTK 4 toolkit and the sleek Libadwaita, Pinta 3.0 brings a redesigned user interface that’s faster, more responsive, and … ⌘ Read more

What’s up with Linux support for Qualcomm X Elite chips?
Remember when Qualcomm promised Linux would be a first-tier platform alongside Windows for its Snapdragon X Elite, almost a year ago now? Well, the Snapdragon X laptop have been out in the market for a while running Windows, but Linux support is still a complete crapshoot, despite the lofty promises by Qualcomm. Tuxedo, a European Linux OEM who promised to ship a Snapdragon X laptop running Linux, has posted an update on … ⌘ Read more

The chroot Technique – a Swiss army multitool for Linux systems
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OH wait! 😳 Why am I storing the timestamp as created = 2025-04-07T19:59:51Z ?! 😱 @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s feed shows:

2025-04-07T19:59:51+00:00	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. 🥴

Hmmmm

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Not according to the output of ./yarnc debug <your feed url>:

znf6csa 2025-04-07T19:59:51+00:00	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. 🥴

Doesn’t look like it Hmmm

sqlite> select * from twts where content LIKE '%Linux installation%';
    hash = znf6csa
feed_url = https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt
 content = 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. 🥴
 created = 2025-04-07T19:59:51Z
 subject = (#znf6csa)
mentions = []
    tags = []
   links = []

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