Speaking of UIs, this is how Thunderbird looks now:

https://movq.de/v/a41105eebb/

So we continue to let every program make up its own UI style (and then we complain that “the Linux desktop” looks “messy” and “inconsistent”). I guess this uses GTK, but it doesn’t look like any other GTK program. Buttons, tabs, drop-downs, whatever, it’s all different. It even has its own subwindow system (i.e., popups that you can’t move).

I didn’t say this in the blog post, but I’m convinced that programmers these days absolutely positively hate everything that looks even remotely like Windows 95 or Motif – with a passion. I see that in my coworkers as well, they really can’t stand it. It’s an emotional thing.

And so marks the beginning of text-based updates for Living Cartoon Company. Will be made available to Linux Prepper more broadly.

Gave up reinstalling Asahi Linux on my M1 after repeated failed attempts. I’ll just wait for my Framework to arrive 💻

@bender@twtxt.net It’s been a while (6.5 years) since I’ve done this. I’d do it like this:

• Boot some Linux from a USB stick on the new machine. Preferably Arch Linux, since that is what I’m running and that’ll make the upcoming chroot easier.
  
• Partition the new disk, create LUKS devices, filesystems, …
  
• Mount the new filesystems and copy all data (user data and the system itself – everything). Do this either over the network or by hooking up the old disk directly.
  
• chroot into the new system (Arch has an arch-chroot tool for that which is used during normal installation, if I’m not mistaken). Inside the chroot, install the bootloader.
  
• Do some fixups, like adjusting /etc/fstab or /etc/crypttab.
  

And I think that should be it. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Turns out, this actually was a little machine once (small netbook): https://movq.de/blog/postings/2011-04-28/0/POSTING-de.html And then I moved the whole installation to a different laptop later. I love that you can easily do that on Linux.

Just missed the 15th anniversary of the Linux installation on my laptop:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-04-27 11:38] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

Sorry: Unix, not linux.

@d74a3: I guess, he points to a linux kernel for an i486. You can install linux on old computers, f.e. netbsd. I had running netbsd on an old sinix 486 parallel to win98se.

Pre-ordered a Framework Laptop 13 Pro. It’s not ARM, but the CNC aluminium case and haptic trackpad sold me. Moving macOS → Linux 💻

“I really get the feeling that it’s time to leave i486 support behind.” https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/commit/?h=x86/platform&id=8b793a92d862c89055daa97ffa61a6929cf732f9

hey folks, is there any good twtxt client for linux out there that you recommend? every time i update pip or some other python stuff twtxt gets screwed and ask for some dependency or breaks, it is annoying to fix that everytime, thanks

Via https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/3220#issuecomment-4198066671 I came across this nice selection on why not to use AI: https://github.com/Vxrpenter/AIMania/blob/main/WHY.md#why

This then lead me to the slopware list: https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware

Holy shit, there’s even more than I thought. :-O In addition to Vim, the following affects me more or less daily (but hopefully not my ancient versions): curl, VLC, ImageMagick, rsync, Python, systemd and even the Linux Kernel itself. Oh fuck me dead. :‘-(

Finished reading Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds. As a Linux/Unix geek, it’s an interesting story, also fun. Would like an update ★★★★ 📗

I installed Alpine Linux on my laptop. I’m pissed that Devuan wouldn’t boot after installing. Msg to Devuan devs: terrible UX after “successfully” installing when you see “grub>”.

Twtxt, hoy te escribo conectado a ~tp desde Debian GNU/Hurd virtualizado con Qemu sobre Devuan GNU/Linux.

I’ve only got a handful of syscalls working right now. Taking inspiration from the calling convention of the Linux kernel and even made the service/interrupt handler int 0x80h 🤣 I’ve only got read, write, alloc and exit working righ tnow 🥲

Took me nearly all week (in my spare time), but Mu (µ) finally officially support linux/amd64 🥳 I completely refactored the native code backend and borrowed a lot of the structure from another project called wazero (the zero dependency Go WASM runtime/compiler). This is amazing stuff because now Mu (µ) runs in more places natively, as well as running everywhere Go runs via the bytecode VM interpreter 🤞

This week, Mu (µ) get s bit more serious and starts to refactor the native backend (a lot). Soon™ we will support darwin/arm64, linux/arm64 and linux/amd64 (Yes, other forms of BSD will come!) – Mu (µ) also last week grew concurrency support too! 🤣

Do you have a linux/unix terminal? Try weechat for chat.freenode.net/6697 -ssl

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Yes; however the interpreter is also platform dependent and relies on making raw syscalls. This is so the runtime semantics remain the same between the two execution modes.

I’ll see if I can add support for linux/amd64 and netbsd/amd64 for the VM at least.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s not super comfortable, that’s right.

But these mouse events come with a caveat anyway:

ncurses uses the XM terminfo entry to enable mouse events, but it looks like this entry does not enable motion events for most terminal emulators. Reporting motion events is supported by, say, XTerm, xiate, st, or urxvt, it just isn’t activated by XM. This makes all this dragging stuff useless.

For the moment, I edited the terminfo entry for my terminal to include motion events. That can’t be a proper solution. I’m not sure yet if I’m supposed to send the appropriate sequence manually …

And the terminfo entries for tmux or screen don’t include XM at all. tmux itself supports the mouse, but I’m not sure yet how to make it pass on the events to the programs running inside of it (maybe that’s just not supported).

To make things worse, on the Linux VT (outside of X11 or Wayland), the whole thing works differently: You have to use good old gpm to get mouse events (gpm has been around forever, I already used this on SuSE Linux). ncurses does support this, but this is a build flag and Arch Linux doesn’t set this flag. So, at the moment, I’m running a custom build of ncurses as a quick hack. 😅 And this doesn’t report motion events either! Just clicks. (I don’t know if gpm itself can report motion events, I never used the library directly.)

tl;dr: The whole thing will probably be “keyboard first” and then the mouse stuff is a gimmick on top. As much as I’d like to, this isn’t going to be like TUI applications on DOS. I’ll use “Windows” for popups or a multi-window view (with the “WindowManager” being a tiny little tiling WM).

Mu (µ) is coming along really nicely 🤣 Few things left to do (in order):

• Finish the concurrency support.
  
• Add support for sockets
  
• Add support for linux/amd64
  
• Rewrite the heap allocator
  
• Rewrite Mu (µ) in well umm Mu (µ) 😅
  

Here’s a screenshot showing off the builtin help():

And now the event loop is not a simple loop around curses’ getch() anymore but it can wait for events on any file descriptor. Here’s a simple test program that waits for connections on a TCP socket, accepts it, reads a line, sends back a line:

https://movq.de/v/93fa46a030/vid-1767547942.mp4

And the scrollbar indicators are working now.

I’ll probably implement timer callbacks using timerfd (even though that’s Linux-only). 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net No, that’s Python/curses on Linux. 😅

Ok, the standard library implementation is wonky at best, at least in regards to XDG, because it really doesn’t implement it properly. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/62382 I stick to my own code then. It doesn’t properly support anything else than Linux or Unixes that use XDG, but personally, I don’t care about them anyway. And the cross-platform situation is a giant mess. Unsurprisingly.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kiwu@twtxt.net it just so happens to be a happy coincidence that I’m extending mu’s capabilities to now include a native toolchain-free compiler (doesn’t rely on any external gcc/clang or linkers, etc) that lowers the mu source code into an intermediate representation / IR (what @movq@www.uninformativ.de refers to as “thick layers of abstractions”…) and finally to SSA + ARM64 + Mach-O encoder to produce native binary executables (at least for me on my Mac, Linux may some later?) 🤣

I’m seeing crashes in the 3D subsystem. (Gallium? Glamor? Whatever other Mesa thing they have? No idea.) In the logs I find this:

malloc(): unaligned tcache chunk detected

And that’s why I still care about Rust and want to learn more about it, even though it’s giving me so much headache and I’ve given up so many times. Because Rust currently seems to be the only popular systems programming language that tries to eliminate these error classes.

And of course “the Rust experiment” in the Linux kernel has recently been concluded as “successful”, so that alone is reason enough for me:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/

Alright, Advent of Code is over:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-12/0/POSTING-en.html

It’s been quite the time sink, especially with the DOS games on top, but it was fun. 🥳

In case you’re wondering: All puzzles (except for part 2 of day 10) were doable in Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4 and ran in a finite time on the Pentium 133. Puzzle 10/2 might have been doable as well if I had better education. 🤣

With irc.com everything is easy. With weechat client for linux/unix things are not so easy. Everything is explained in freenode.net .

FWIW, day 03 and day 04 where solved on SuSE Linux 6.4:

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day03.jpg

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day04%2Dv3.jpg

Performance really is an issue. Anything is fast on a modern machine with modern Python. But that old stuff, oof, it takes a while … 😅

Should have used C or Java. 🤪 Well, maybe I do have to fall back on that for later puzzles. We’ll see.

Advent of Code 2025 starts tomorrow. 🥳🎄

This year, I’m going to use Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4, writing the code on my trusty old Pentium 133 with its 64 MB of RAM. No idea if that old version of Python will be fast enough for later puzzles. We’ll see.

@prologic@twtxt.net Nothing, yet. It was sent in written form. There’s probably little point in fighting this, they have made up their minds already (and AI is being rolled up en masse in other departments), but on the other hand, there are – truthfully – very few areas where AI could actually be useful to me.

There are going to be many discussions about this …

This is completely against the “spirit” of this company, btw. We used to say: “It’s the goal that matters. Use whatever tools you think are appropriate.” That’s why I’m allowed to use Linux on my laptop. Maybe they will back down eventually when they realize that trying to push this on people is pointless. Maybe not.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Uh, that actually looks not that terrible. Somehow, I remember Swing GUIs being way uglier.

As for Visual Basic, I only had to use VBA once in my life. That was in the beginning of my career when I inherited a project from a leaving coworker. Fuck me, was that awful. Just alone the damn compiler error dialog box popping up in my face all the time while editing and the compiler already trying to parse the unfinished and hence of course uncompilable code. Boy, that left a lasting impression on me. I ported everything to Java very quickly. Luckily, the code base wasn’t all that large at that point in time. I had to add a bunch of new features after that, so I was very glad that I convinced my workmate/project manager to do that first. We didn’t even need a GUI, the button in Excel was transformed to a command line program that just generated the large file.

But I cannot comment on the VB GUI designer, I never used that. Your screenshot looks very similar to the Delphi one, though. Only towards the end of my Delphi days I found out about the possibility to make the widgets snap to window edges and corners (I don’t remember how that was called), so that resizing the windows was actually possible without messing up their entire contents.

Switching to Linux, Delphi wasn’t an option anymore. For some reason I couldn’t use Kylix. Maybe it was already dead by the time I changed OSes. Or I couldn’t get it to run. I just don’t remember. I just recall that the unavailability of Delphi was the reason it took me a while to actually settle on Linux. I then fully switched to Java. The GridBagLayout was my absolutely favorite Swing layout manager. I reckon I used it 98% of the time, because it was so powerful and made the windows resize properly, just as I had learned to do in Delphi shortly before.

Up until discovering Swing, I used Java’s AWT for a short amount of time. That was very limited I think and I hit the limits fairly quickly. Later at uni, we had one project making use of SWT. Didn’t convince me either. I could be wrong, but I think there was also a SWT GUI designer plugin for Eclipse. If there really was, that one wasn’t in the same street as Delphi’s (there must be a reason I forgot about it ;-)).

And maybe I should go back to using GUI designers. Haven’t used those since the Visual Basic days. 🤔 It wasn’t pretty, but you got results very quickly and efficiently.

(When I switched to Linux, I quickly got stuck with GTK and that only had Glade, which wasn’t super great at the time, so I didn’t start using it … and then I never questioned that decision …)

https://movq.de/v/eaa24b109b/vb.png

There are no really good GUI toolkits for Linux, are there?

They’re either slow (like GTK4, Qt6), don’t support Wayland (like Tk), and/or unmaintained (like GTK2 and many others).

Well, it sure has been a while since I last posted here. Just up late doing yet another Linux installation. Debian turned out to be about as stable as a plutonium Jenga tower, and Alpine refused to boot, so I gave it the boot. Here’s to hoping that Arch fares better. Oddly, I’ve always found Arch to be considerably more stable than other distros…

⭐ Excellent petit éditeur de texte multi-plateforme (Linux, Mac, […] 🔗 https://yom.li/notes/20251008110810 🔖 https://micro-editor.github.io/

Today, I experimented with Linux Capabilities as a continuation to my Unix Domain Sockets research from a few months ago: https://lyse.isobeef.org/caller-information-via-unix-domain-sockets/#capabilities

I learned that I don’t know hardly anything and there is heaps more to explore. Tomorrow, I will do the same in Go and see how that feels.

All good things come to an end, I guess.

I have an Epson printer (AcuLaser C1100) and an Epson scanner (Perfection V10), both of which I bought about 20 years ago. The hardware still works perfectly fine.

Until recently, Epson still provided Linux drivers for them. That is pretty cool! I noticed today that they have relaunched their driver website – and now I can’t find any Linux drivers for that hardware anymore. Just doesn’t list it (it does list some drivers for Windows 7, for example).

I mean, okay, we’re talking about 20 years here. That is a very long time, much more than I expected. But if it still works, why not keep using it?

Some years ago, I started archiving these drivers locally, because I anticipated that they might vanish at some point. So I can still use my hardware for now (even if I had to reinstall my PC for some reason). It might get hacky at some point in the future, though.

This once more underlines the importance of FOSS drivers for your hardware. I sadly didn’t pay attention to that 20 years ago.

Just installed zsh and oh-my-zsh on my alpine linux vps

@prologic@twtxt.net No, this is a Linux manpage from the man-pages project: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/man/man7/ascii.7

I do have an idea what’s going on. Could be an unfortunate interaction between the table preprocessor tbl and the man macro package. 🤔

@zvava@twtxt.net Going to have to hard disagree here I’m sorry. a) no-one reads the raw/plain twtxt.txt files, the only time you do is to debug something, or have a stick beak at the comments which most clients will strip out and ignore and b) I’m sorry you’ve completely lost me! I’m old enough to pre-date before Linux became popular, so I’m not sure what UNIX principles you think are being broken or violated by having a Twt Subject (Subject) whose contents is a cryptographic content-addressable hash of the “thing”™ you’re replying to and forming a chain of other replies (a thread).

I’m sorry, but the simplest thing to do is to make the smallest number of changes to the Spec as possible and all agree on a “Magic Date” for which our clients use the modified function(s).

Gemini-PDA-Linux-Scripts https://github.com/matthewbaggett/Gemini-PDA-Linux-Scripts

Hmm, not experiencing that. Using Zen (Firefox), under Linux, with uBlock Origin.

Reverse Engineering of the Lockbit Linux ESXi Variant https://hackandcheese.com/posts/blog1_lockbit/

Aegis Authenticator and Linux Authenticator ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/852

What kind of client for linux do I need?

Is that really necessary? How hard is it to make a 32-bit build? 🤔 Honest question. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2025/09/05/firefox-32-bit-linux-support-to-end-in-2026/

@dce@hashnix.club Apart from the crap produced in Redmond two decades ago, I only ever used and still happily use Linux, mainly Debian and Ubuntu. I’ve no idea, but maybe something in there catches your eye: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operating_systems (I know, what a silly recommendation.)

I have a late-2010s ThinkPad running OpenBSD, but it’s about as fast as a snail carrying heavy shopping through molasses. I’d like to run something other than Linux, for variety, but the other members of the BSD family failed for various reasons. What OS do you guys think I should try?