OSnews

Budgie 10.7 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, featuring major re-architectures, new APIs for extensibility, and polish to the user experience. For a point release, there’s a lot of changes, improvements, and new features in here, as the release notes detail. The changes are all over the place – from a brand new application indexer to replace libgnome-menus, to dual-GPU support, notification improvements, general UX improvements, and much more.

This is the bigger, more deluxe of the two Mattel dedicated D&D games (the Intellivision of course had its own set, and we had a Tandyvision ourselves), the other being the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS™ Computer Fantasy Game. That was a handheld unit with a surprisingly compelling implementation of Hunt the Wumpus, and something we might talk about another time. This one is more like a board game, but with a computer antagonist and audio. The box says copyright 1980 but I think we got it late 1982 or early 1983. Either way, I was probably too young for this game at the time: it advertises 8 and up, and I would have been around six or so. It requires you to juggle a number of different audio signals and build up the maze and the objects in it (you, your competitor, the dragon, the treasure, your lifeless defiled corpses when you try to get the treasure, etc.). My recollection is that we barely played it at all. Well, better late than never. And hey: let’s find out what makes it tick. (Teaser: it’s four bits and we have an annotated die photo. Read on.) And read on you should – if you’re into amazingly detailed looks into children’s toys from the late ’70s/early ’80s based on 4 bit chips, that is. And you are, aren’t you?

As was revealed a handful of weeks ago, Microsoft is currently working on a significant update to File Explorer on Windows 11 that will update several core areas of the app with modern designs and new features that will better integrate the experience with OneDrive and Microsoft 365. The home page itself is being updated with more integration with Microsoft 365. Along the top will be a feed of “recommended” files, which will be presented with larger thumbnails that will make it easier to see what files are being suggested to you. That’s a lot of excuses for ads.

DiscoBSD is a 2.11BSD-based UNIX-like operating system for microcontrollers, with a focus on high portability to memory constrained devices without a memory management unit. This microcontroller-focused operating system is the continuation of RetroBSD, a 2.11BSD-based OS targeting only the MIPS-based PIC32MX7. DiscoBSD is multi-platform, as it also supports Arm Cortex-M4 STM32F4 devices. We mentioned RetroBSD before, way back in 2014 and 2018. Good to see the project is still alive, albeit under a new name.

While developing mirrord, which heavily relies on injecting itself into other people’s binaries, we ran into some challenges posed by macOS’s SIP (System Integrity Protection). This post details how we ultimately overcame these challenges, and we hope it can be of help to other people hoping to learn about SIP, as we’ve learned the hard way that there’s very little written about this subject on the internet. Potentially useful information for macOS developers.

The Justice Department and a group of eight states sued Google on Tuesday, accusing it of illegally abusing a monopoly over the technology that powers online advertising, in the agency’s first antitrust lawsuit against a tech giant under President Biden and an escalation in legal pressure on one of the world’s biggest internet companies. The lawsuit said Google had “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.” More of this, please.

Welcome to Magic Cap, the oddest yet somehow most endearing interface a PDA — and, briefly, Windows 95 — ever had. Unlike the Palm OS where I bought my first device brand new, I was a late convert to Magic Cap, picking up this wacky device called a DataRover in 2004 just to play with. It wasn’t exactly pocket-sized, but it was still quite portable, and the whimsical audio feedback and immediately accessible interface drew me in. I found some games and an Ethernet driver and the browser and enjoyed using it as a handheld in my old apartment. Despite my love for PDAs and my pretty large collection of devices covering most PDA platforms, I’ve never actually owned or used a Magic Cap device. I wonder if it’s time to address that shortcoming.

But as you might think, nobody at AMD envisioned it that way in the planning or design stages. No engineer would ever start working with the idea to “build a shit product”; a recent chat with an engineer who was at AMD during Bulldozer’s development gave us additional insight on what the original goals for the architecture were. AMD originally wanted Bulldozer to be like K10, but with a shared frontend and FPU. In one architecture, AMD would improve single threaded performance while massively increasing multithreaded performance, and move to a new 32 nm node at the same time. But those goals were too ambitious, and AMD struggled to keep clock frequency up on the 32 nm process. This resulted in cuts to the architecture, which started to stack up. The last AMD processor I used pre-Zen was a Phenom II, which was a fine processor for the price. However, after that, it quickly became clear that Intel had taken the lead. As such, I never experienced this era of AMD, and I think many of you will have had the same experience. This makes articles like these incredibly interesting.

While working on my Windows 3.x display driver, I ran into a vexing problem. In Windows 3.1 running in Enhanced 386 mode, I could start a DOS session and switch it to a window. But an attempt to set a mode in the DOS window (e.g. MODE CO80) would destroy the Windows desktop, preventing further drawing from happening properly. It was possible to recover by using Alt+Enter to switch the DOS window to full screen again and then returning to the desktop, but obviously that wasn’t going to cut it. Oddly enough, this problem did not exist in Windows 3.0. And in fact it also didn’t exist in Windows 3.1 if I used the Windows 3.0 compatible VDDVGA30.386 VxD shipped with Windows 3.1 (plus the corresponding VGA30.3GR grabber). A classic retro computing bug hunt! These stories are always a good read.

Recent Windows 11 Insider builds include support for ReFS, the Resilient File System. The file system is currently only available in Windows server operating systems, but not in client systems. Resilient File System is designed to “maximize data availability, scale efficiently to large data sets across diverse workloads, and provide data integrity with resiliency to corruption” according to Microsoft. I doubt ReFS will replace NTFS any time soon, but with Windows’ lacklustre support for file systems, it’s always interesting to see something new come up.

Ahead of these layoffs, Fuchsia appeared to be on an upward trajectory within Google. After years of being a skunkworks project, the company’s from-scratch operating system has grown to be used in the Nest Hub series and is poised to be used in an upcoming device. There are even indications of Google ramping up Fuchsia development internally in recent months. Considering Google’s overall workforce is set to be reduced by around 6%, the Fuchsia team appears to have been targeted more directly by the layoffs than other divisions. It’s not yet clear what this may mean for the project going forward. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to heavily cut the workforce of a team building a brand new operating system from scratch that you’ve only just started putting in consumers’ hands, but what do I know?

Has anyone ever heard of the Apple YACC, or YACCintosh? it was a 68010 prototype mac intended to do colour in 1986. Weirdly enough someone managed to find the ROMs *and* the PALS for it, but no schematics have turned up yet. All of the stuff is on bitsavers. I do not know what to add here. This seems to be one of the most obscure – if not the most obscure – Apple efforts out there, as there are virtually zero references of it online.

Happy 40th Birthday to Lisa! The Apple Lisa computer, that is. In celebration of this milestone, CHM has received permission from Apple to release the source code to the Lisa software, including its system and applications software. Access the code here. More of this please.

This is the second installment of the Defender’s Guide series. In keeping with the theme, we are discussing Windows Services, the underlying technology, common attack vectors, and methods of securing/monitoring them. Services are an important part of the Windows operating system, allowing the control and configuration of long-running processes essential to keeping the OS functional. This also allows services to be a common vector of escalation and persistence by attackers. Some services (especially custom services) run with high privilege levels, and are set to restart themselves on boot. This is a slam dunk for the enterprising attacker looking to gain a foothold in an environment. Everything you ever wanted to know about services in Windows, particularly as it relates to security.

I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the <Win> key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. On my powerful laptop (SSD and 32 GB of RAM) this process usually takes as long as it takes me to type these characters, just a fraction of a second. Usually. Sometimes, however, it takes longer. A lot longer. As in, tens of seconds. The slowdowns are unpredictable but recently I was able to record an Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) trace of one of these delays. With a bit of help from people on twitter I was able to analyze the trace and understand why it took about a minute to launch notepad. I loved reading every bit of this post. Even for someone not versed in programming, it’s quite easy to follow along and understand what is happening deep in the bowels of Windows when this bug occurs. I’ll spoil the surprise: This deserves reiterating. My start menu was hung due to the combination of heap corruption and WerFault.exe deciding that it needed to upload the crash dump before releasing the old process so that a new one could be started. And uploading the crash dump ran into issues, causing the delay. The tools to watch for bugs is causing more bugs. Who watches the watchers?

Here are some of the major cuts in the tech industry so far. All numbers are approximations based on filings, public statements and media reports. Many of the listed companies have experienced – and are experiencing – insane growth and financial success.

So we weren’t surprised to hear that Chrome users were concerned after learning that several of the internet’s most popular ad blockers, like uBlock Origin, would lose some of their privacy-preserving functionality on Google’s web browser, resulting from the changes Manifest V3 brings to Chrome’s extensions platform – changes that strengthen other facets of security, while unfortunately limiting the capabilities of certain types of privacy extensions. But rest assured that in spite of these changes to Chrome’s new extensions architecture, Firefox’s implementation of Manifest V3 ensures users can access the most effective privacy tools available like uBlock Origin and other content-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions. I’m so glad Firefox exists. There simply isn’t any viable alternative to it, and that’s why I’m continuously worried about the continued existence of Mozilla. The story around Manifest V3 is just another example of why Firefox is superior.

Here’s an in-depth look at a portable, ruggedized, third-party PA-RISC system running a pre-CDE version of HP-UX. The SAIC Galaxy family consisted of two systems, the 1000 and the 1100. Both the 1000 and 1100 were essentially recased 9000/712 workstations with minor hardware modifications and custom added electronics, but all of the systems I’ve seen including mine are Galaxy 1100s, based on an 80MHz PA-7100LC (the 1000 reportedly ran the 60MHz version).

Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment and a set of applications in Common Lisp. To get an overview, see The Power of Structure. Otherwise, the essays listed below may be read in any order. This goes far beyond my comfort level, but I’m pretty sure quite a few of you will find this project incredibly interesting.

In case you thought IBM AIX had a future, IBM’s legacy proprietary Unix, IBM apparently doesn’t. The Register reported Friday that IBM has moved the entire AIX development group to IBM India, apparently their Bangalore office, and placing 80 US-based developers into “redeployment.” That’s a fairly craven way of replacing layoffs with musical chairs, requiring the displaced developers to either find a new position within the company (possibly relocating as well) within some unspecified period, or retire. About a third of IBM’s global staff is on the Indian subcontinent. IBM didn’t publicly announce this move and while it’s undoubtedly good news for IBM India it seems bad news for AIX’s prospects: the technologies IBM thinks are up and coming IBM tends to spend money on, and so an obvious cost-cutting move suggests IBM doesn’t think AIX is one of those things. The writing’s on the wall for all the remaining commercial UNIX variants. By this point I think most of the work being done on AIX and HP-UX is maintaining the install base and fulfilling support contracts, after which there’s no real reason to keep these platforms going.

The Altair 8800 arguably launched Microsoft. Now Dave Glover from Microsoft offers an emulated and potentially cloud-based Altair emulation with CP/M and Microsoft Basic. You can see a video of the project below. One thing that makes it a bit odd compared to other Altair clones we’ve seen is that the emulator runs in a Docker environment and is fully cloud-enabled. You can interact with it via a PCB front panel, or a terminal running in a web browser. Neat.

Recently over the holiday break, I became interested in the 2600’s hardware architecture and started reading everything that I could find about it. I knew that it was some kind of 6502-based system, and I’d heard mentions of “racing the beam”, but that’s as far as my knowledge went. I was shocked to discover how primitive the 2600 hardware was, even compared to contemporary 6502 systems like the Apple II, Commodore PET, and even Atari’s own 8-bit computers. The 2600 was a bit before my time – I’m from 1984 – and I’ve never even seen one in person. While I understand how important and influential the 2600 really was, I find the games and technology just a bit too primitive to enjoy today, whereas games for the NES I can still happily play today. I’m sure if you grew up with the 2600, you’d disagree.

On Sunday, a Chuck E. Cheese employee named Stewart Coonrod posted a TikTok video that documents the process of installing a new song-and-dance show on an old Chuck E. Cheese animatronics system—a process that involves a 3.5-inch floppy disk and two DVDs. Coonrod says it is the last update before his store undergoes a remodel that will remove the animatronics altogether. I’ve never visited this restaurant chain, but I always love peeks behind the curtain of the technology places like this use. It reminds me of our favourite bar near the red light district in Amsterdam, which used a touchscreen computer running BeOS to manage its music playlist.

Confession time: I don’t fully understand how terminals, shells and SSH really work (and my guess is you don’t either). And I don’t mean the cryptography behind SSH. I mean how SSH and the terminal — and the shell for that matter — interact with one another. I recently realized that even though I’ve been daily remotely logging into Linux systems for all of my adult life (and type in the shell and Vim) I didn’t really grasp how these things actually work. I mean, it’s one of those things I kind of understand, but not completely. The author of the short linked post found four articles that detail all this stuff quite well, so go on over there and see just how well you really understood it.

NetBSD continues using the FFS file-system by default while it’s offered ZFS support that has been slowly improving — in NetBSD-CURRENT is the ability to use ZFS as the root file-system if first booting to FFS, for example. There may be another modern file-system option soon with an effort underway to port DragonFlyBSD’s HAMMER2 over to NetBSD. The GitHub repository has the code if you’re up for contributing.

One unfortunate fact of my life is that I have to deal with an obscure database whose macOS drivers require the addition of a directory to DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH for their Python driver to find them. To make matters worse, Apple’s CLI tools strip that variable away as part of macOS’s System Integrity Protection (SIP) before running a command. Given that DYLD_* environment variables are a known attack vector for Mac malware, that’s a good thing in general. However, sometimes one needs a workaround to get the job done. Some of this made sense to me.

Your T95 is infected with malware pre-installed, ready to do whatever the C2 servers decide. Yes, malware from Amazon straight to your door! If they insist on selling these devices they really should add an “Includes Malware” category in the Android TV section. I find it absolutely baffling that Amazon is full of sketchy garbage like this, and nobody really seems to care. Amazon itself, lawmakers, consumers – everybody just takes it for granted?

Ars reports: It’s the end of the line for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. These older versions of Windows (plus Windows RT) stop receiving all security updates today, over a decade after their original releases. Microsoft will also stop providing Microsoft Edge browser updates for these operating systems in a few days, and the remaining third-party apps that still work will eventually follow suit (Google Chrome support, most notably, ends early next month). Windows 7 support for most people actually ended three years ago, but businesses that still used it could pay for up to three years of additional support while they transitioned to Windows 10 or 11. That window has now closed, and Microsoft isn’t offering a paid support option for Windows 8.1. Run an unspported operating system, or invite more ads and spyware. Tough call.

So the Japanese market had very specific requirements, that PCs could not fulfill in the early DOS days. You couldn’t just replace the character ROM on your PC and make it display Japanese text (IBM did later develop the 5550 and the JX, a derivative of the PCjr, specifically for the Japanese market, and later, they developed the DOS/V variant, which added support for Japanese text to their PS/2 line, using standard VGA hardware, which by now had caught up in terms of resolution). Instead, Japanese companies jumped into the niche of developing business machines for the home market. Most notably NEC. In 1981 they introduced the PC-8800 series, an 8-bit home computer based on a Z80 CPU and BASIC. In 1982, the PC-9800 series followed, a more high-end 16-bit business-oriented personal computer based on an 8086 CPU and MS-DOS. These families of machines became known as PC-88 and PC-98 respectively (Note that the ‘PC’ name here is not a reference to IBM, as NEC had already released the PC-8000 series in 1979). I love these machines.

Several weeks ago, we published an article detailing five not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11. Recommended websites in the Start menu (introduced in build 25247) appear in the list as arguably one of Microsoft’s worst ideas. Luckily, the company has decided to backtrack that controversial change. Those unhappy with Windows 11 showing more ads on the Start menu will be glad to learn that developers removed recommended websites in the latest preview build. A bit of positive news on the ads-in-Windows front for once.

Last year, Ubuntu developers pushed to remove Zsys from Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer. This is an integral tool Ubuntu created to make it easier to manage and maintain ZFS-based installations. In a bug report they bluntly noted that ‘priority changes’ in the desktop team meant Zsys was no longer something they want to “advertise using”. As of writing, Zsys remains available in the Ubuntu archives but development of it isn’t looking healthy. Canonical’s contributions effectively fall off a cliff circa April 2021 based on GitHub commits, with only a trivial tweak made in April of last year. Daily builds for the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release come with a brand-new installer that has been built using Flutter to Canonical’s exact needs. But guess what this new Ubuntu installer does not include? An option to install Ubuntu on the ZFS file system. I thought the Linux world had settled on Btrfs as the “ZFS-like” file system for the platform, and had no idea Canonical had even been working on giving users the option to install to ZFS. With Btrfs already being the default on e.g. Fedora for a while now, it seems that is a better route to go for Ubuntu and other distributions than trying to make ZFS work.

At CES today, Sony gave a look at its latest PlayStation 5 gaming controller, but this one is very different from its previous designs. Aimed at lowering the barrier of entry for players with disabilities, Project Leonardo for the PS5 is a highly customizable controller kit that has been developed with help from organizations such as AbleGamers, SpecialEffect and Stack Up. The unique-looking controller does not have an official name nor a price attached to it yet, but Sony gave an in depth look at its features today. The unique design is said to help players with limited motor control, letting them use the controller for long periods and be accurate without much difficulty. This is very similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller, and a very welcome product for those with disabilities.

DragonFly version 6.4 is the next step in the 6.x release series. This version has hardware support for type-2 hypervisors with NVMM, an amdgpu driver, the experimental ability to remote-mount HAMMER2 volumes, and many other changes. The details of all commits between the 6.2 and 6.4 releases are available in the associated commit messages for 6.4.0. The downloads are ready.

Google’s keynote at the RISC-V Summit was all about bold proclamations, though. Lars Bergstrom, Android’s director of engineering, wants RISC-V to be seen as a “tier-1 platform” in Android, which would put it on par with Arm. That’s a big change from just six months ago. Bergstrom says getting optimized Android builds on RISC-V will take “a lot of work” and outlined a roadmap that will take “a few years” to come to fruition, but AOSP started to land official RISC-V patches back in September. Another vote of confidence for RISC-V.

It’s 2023, and Windows 11 is finally a mature operating system that most people would be happy to use. Sun Valley has finally arrived, and it’s all about a long overdue reinvestment in design under Panos Panay’s leadership. But is it enough? Let’s take a look. For the purpose of this research, I used Windows 11 build 25267, which as of now is the latest Insider Dev build. Death, taxes, and new windows theme layers.

Vanilla OS has released its first version. Vanilla OS is an immutable desktop Linux distribution that brings some interesting new technologies to the table, such as the Apx package manager. By default, Apx provides a container based on your Linux distribution (Ubuntu 22.10 for Vanilla OS 22.10) and wraps all commands from the distribution’s package manager (apt for Ubuntu). Nevertheless, you can install packages from other package distributions. For example, using the --aur flag, a new container based on Arch Linux will be created. Here, apx will manage the packages from the AUR (Pacman and yay), tightly integrating them with the host system. Using the --dnf flag with apx will create a new container based on Fedora Linux. Here, apx will manage packages from Fedora’s DNF repository, tightly integrating them with the host system. Another tentpole technology is ABRoot, which brings atomicity to this distribution. Atomicity is the ability to perform a specific operation in a way where if it fails, nothing will be changed and if it succeeds, the changes will be applied in their entirety. ABRoot achieves this by transacting between 2 root file systems: A and B. Let’s make an example. Let’s say you want to install a new package. ABRoot will check which partition is the present root partition (i.e A), then it will mount an overlay on top of it and perform the transaction. If the transaction succeeds, the overlay will be merged with the future root partition (i.e B). On your next boot, the system will automatically switch to the new root partition (B). In case of failure, the overlay will be discarded and the system will boot normally, without any changes to either partition. Vanilla OS looks incredibly interesting, and I’m definitely keeping an eye on it.

A rant about “year of Linux on the desktop” from a tired old man. I’ve been part of the Linux community since before Linux was called Linux. Over the years there’s been many people telling me directly that Linux is silly or wrong or imperfect, or that free and open source software is foolish or pointless. A lot more people have, of course, pontificated along those lines in public, and not directed it at me. I’m not claiming to be targeted at that, but I’ve been around and active for long enough that things accumulate. It’s the end of a long year for me, and I though I’d let off some steam myself. Hence this rant. Over time, the goal posts of success keep being moved by the naysayers. I’m too tired to dig up all important milestones and dates, or references, but here’s highlights of the timeline as I have experienced it (years may be a little off). The most popular operating system in the world by a huge margin, and yet, it still gets ridiculed by users of platforms that still have to manually install drivers and update applications by hand while getting spied on left, right, and centre. Strange times we live in.

WuMgr (Update Manager for Windows) is a tool to manage updates of Microsoft products on the Windows operating system. It uses the “Windows Update Agent API” to identify as well as download and install missing updates. It allows the user fine control of updates on modern (Windows 10) operating system versions, comparable to what windows 7 and 8.1 offered. This functionality should be included in Windows by default, and the fact that it isn’t is just one of the many laughable deficiencies Windows is riddled with. And speaking of laughable deficiencies in Windows, a third party user interface to the optional and limited winget package “manager” has recently been updated.

We are excited to announce the release of Formula Suggestions and Formula by Example for Excel web users – a couple exciting capabilities designed to help save you time and learn more about Excel formulas as you use them. Also for web users are suggested links, IMAGE function, and a new search bar in the queries pane. For Windows users, a new keyboard shortcut is available to open the Power Query editor, and Insiders users on Windows can now get data from dynamic arrays and create nested Power Query data types to better organize your data. There’s this whole massive community of wizards out there, and their school of magic is Excel. It baffles me what people can do with this program, yet it’s often ridiculed and ignored despite the sheer skill needed to get the most out of it.

Several months ago I had a go at producing a high resolution 256-color driver for Windows 3.1. The effort was successful but is not yet complete. Along the way I re-learned many things I had forgotten, and learned several new ones. This blog entry is based on notes I made during development. There’s tons of lessons to re-learn when focusing on older platforms, whether as a mere user exploring or reminiscing, or as a developer trying to deal with all the constraints and limitations these old systems bring to the table. I’m glad it’s being documented, because the older these platforms get, the less we’ll remember about them.

This week I received a new 12th Gen Intel laptop from Framework. And like with any new piece of hardware I get these days, my first instinct was to put NixOS on it. But I wasn’t just content with firing up the NixOS installer and getting to work. Oh no no no. You see, I knew there was a better way. I didn’t now exactly what that better way looked like just yet, but I could feel in my bones that it existed. So I did what I usually do when I suspect there’s a better way of doing something in Nix land and pinged Mic92. What you’ll read in the rest of this post is the result of our conversations. NixOS seems incredibly cool, but at the same time, it also seems obtuse and complex, and like any Linux system, it has its share of problems, too. I’m just not entirely sure if it’s of any value to most regular desktop Linux users, or if it is almost exclusively aimed at developers. Since NixOS seems to be popping up in comments all over the web, I’m trying to keep an eye on it and understand what, exactly, it offers over competing products.

The HP LaserJet III laser printer from 1990 used the “Printer Command Language” PCL 5 by default, but could be upgraded with the “HP PostScript Cartridge Plus” cartridge, which contained 2 MB of ROM with Adobe’s PostScript Level 2 rasterizer. Let’s look at the ROM contents and some of its hidden gems. With how printers have become the butt of jokes, it’s easy to forget they were sometimes kind of cool and had interesting technologies, features, and even expansions. The article has a follow-up, as well.

The fourth beta for Haiku R1 over a year and a half of hard work to improve Haiku’s hardware support and its overall stability, and to make lots more software ports available for use. Over 400 bugs and enhancement tickets have been resolved for this release. There’s a lot here to talk about. The improved support for HiDPI looks amazing, and definitely a must-have in today’s world of 4K displays. There’s lots of new and improved drivers, including a new compatibility layer for OpenBSD WiFi drivers, a new NTFS driver, and more. The number of ports has increased by a lot thanks to X11, Gtk+, and even Wayland compatibility – Inkscape, GIMP, GNOME Web, and more. Wine has also been ported to Haiku, using a Haiku-native windowing and input backend. And much, much more. Pretty good way to start Christmas.

With that initial explanation out of the way, in 2022 I’ve been getting my Chumby working with the mainline Linux kernel and slowly trying to submit fixes upstream for issues as I find them. To be clear, I’m not trying to get the stock Chumby software working with the new kernel. That’s likely impossible. The stock software is heavily dependent on Flash which is a dead end. I’m just getting the new kernel running well enough so that I can develop my own custom software for it. I’m going to write a few posts about that process and some of the fun challenges I had to overcome. This first post in the series will talk about some of the work I did with U-Boot. If you’re into Linux kernel development, there’s massive number of devices out there running outdated kernels you could be updating for fun, in your spare time.

Around a year ago, I started working on emulating an iPod Touch 1G using the QEMU emulation software. After months of reverse engineering, figuring out the specifications of various hardware components, and countless debugging runs with GDB, I now have a functional emulation of an iPod Touch that includes display rendering and multitouch support. The emulated device runs the first firmware ever released by Apple for the iPod Touch: iPhoneOS 1.0, build 3A101a. The emulator runs iBoot (the bootloader), the XNU kernel and then executes Springboard. This is quite impressive.

Reports have indicated that Microsoft is planning to release a new Windows version every three years like it was in the times of Windows Vista and Windows 7. However, Microsoft doesn’t want Windows 11 to become boring or unexciting. Microsoft wants to keep Windows 11 constantly updated with “Moment” and some “feature” updates. Microsoft has reportedly scrapped the original Sun Valley 3 project and Windows 11 will receive Windows 11 23H2 based on the existing version 22H2, similar to enablement package updates for Windows 10. Microsoft wants to release a new Windows in 2024 (Windows 12? We don’t know yet). Version. Moment updates. Feature updates. Enablement package updates. 22H2 and 23H2. Cumulative updates. Main development channel. Windows 11 2022 Update. Windows 11 Build 25262. But sure, I am the idiot for not being able to keep track of this nomenclature diarrhea.

Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place. Unified Kernel Images have been championed by the systemd folks for better securing and trusting Linux distributions. Unified kernel images are a combination of the kernel image, initrd, and UEFI stub program all distributed as one. This seems like a fairly no-brainer move, and I’m sure there will be agreement and jolly cooperation on this step forward from all involved in the Linux community.

The Mac Pro is one of the few remaining Intel Macs with no Apple Silicon replacement ready to go, even though we’re a little past the two-year deadline that CEO Tim Cook originally set for the transition in summer 2020 (and to be fair, it has been a hard-to-predict couple of years). Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple continues to work on a new version of the Mac Pro, alongside other as-yet-unreplaced Intel Macs like the higher-end Mac mini and the 27-inch iMac, but that a planned “M2 Extreme” chip that would have powered the Apple Silicon Mac Pro has “likely” been canceled. Waiting for news in the face of uncertainty isn’t new to Mac Pro holdouts; it has been a constant for the last decade-plus. It has been a very long time since the Mac Pro was updated on anything close to a predictable cadence, especially if you don’t count partial refreshes like the 2012 Mac Pro tower or the addition of new GPU options to the 2019 model. And each of the last two updates—the “trash can” Mac Pro in 2013 and the reforged “cheese grater” version from 2019—have reflected a total shift in design and strategy. At this point, I’d like Apple to decide: either commit to a consistent strategy or vision for the Mac Pro and its place in the lineup or retire it. It sure has been a rough time for Mac Pro buyers. The reality of it is that desktop PCs – Apple or otherwise – just aren’t really all that popular anymore compared to laptops, and this probably doubly counts for the very high end. Selling Mac Pros by the thousands simply doesn’t make a whole lot of sense compared to the numbers Apple’s other computers are shipping at.

As of year 2004, Dr. Gary Kildall’s operating system called CP/M was approaching 30 years old. I decided then to describe that history on my Web site, before it was lost. I worked on that through 2008; and updated my notes since. See my DRI home page for links to Web pages about that event, and about about persons, companies and developments related to Digital Research and/or CP/M in the S-100 and microcomputer world of the 1970’s. This Web page provides some ideas about how to get and “run” CP/M today, or past alternatives to CP/M, in the 21st century. I should really set up a CP/M environment to experience what it’s like – when I first started using computers, it had already lost out to DOS.

Tonight’s story time: the Power Macintosh that wouldn’t make any sound in BeOS R5, how I figured out the problem, and how I hacked the sound driver to fix it. OSNews bait, 100%.