This is a community-run resource to help you fix the Windows Update service on earlier versions of Windows. Since Windows XP was discontinued in 2014, followed by Windows 7 in 2020, Microsoft’s support for their earlier OSes has significantly dwindled. As XP and earlier don’t officially support modern security improvements, such as the SHA256 hash algorithm required by modern SSL and Authenticode certificates as of 2019, much of the internet has become inaccessible to these devices. Adding insult to injury, Microsoft actively removed many downloads for XP and earlier versions in 2020. In effect, working with these OSes is now incredibly difficult. Windows Update provides many optional and recommended updates, in addition to drivers for your system, but Windows XP and 2000 can only install critical security updates through the built-in Automatic Updates feature. Legacy Update revives the original Windows Update website – the only way to see and install every update available for your system. This is very cool for virtual machines and old boxes you may have lying around for use with legacy software or games.
Nearly two years after the release of Xfce 4.16, here comes another major update to one of the oldest and lightest desktop environments for GNU/Linux distributions, Xfce 4.18. Xfce 4.18 is packed with lots of new features and improvements to the file manager, panel, plugins, and other core components. For example, the Thunar file manager now features not one but two image preview side panes, a new Split View, recursive search, and finally lets you undo or redo basic file operations. It also contains fixes for HiDPI, which was a major sticking point for my when I tried 4.16. Can’t wait to see how much it has improved.
As part of a larger story about Apple’s plans to allow third-party app stores on the iPhone and iPad in EU countries, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman claimed that Apple is also considering removing its requirement for iPhone and iPad web browsers to use WebKit, the open source browser engine that powers Safari. Well, well, well. The EU might actually force Apple to turn iOS into a real operating system.
The Verge, reporting on a paywalled story from Bloomberg: Apple is planning to let users install alternative app stores on iOS, according to a report from Bloomberg. The shift would be a remarkable change from the company, which has famously only allowed iPhone and iPad users to download apps from the App Store. The plans are reportedly being spurred on by the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is meant to enact “rules for digital gatekeepers to ensure open markets” when its restrictions become a requirement in 2024, according to a press release. The law means that Apple will not only have to allow third-party app stores but sideloading as well, where users can install software downloaded from the web. Apple executives have previously called the ability to sideload software “a cybercriminal’s best friend” in response to the act. I’m glad at least one government is doing something to address the blatant abuse of power in the tech industry. This is a major concession by Apple, and one that will have massive consequences. Users will regain a lot of control over their Apple devices, and developers harmed by Apple’s random and opaque “rules” and application thereof will now have alternatives to explore. On top of that, this will force the App Store to compete on merit, something it has never had to do before, and it will enable applications Apple would never allow to come to iOS. And of course, if you’re not interested in any of this – don’t add any third party stores, and don’t sideload. If this is tied to EU Apple hardware, there’s going to be a thriving grey market of people importing EU Apple devices into the US.
Creating the PiRS232 and playing with the Pi over serial has been leading towards an idea – I wanted to create a small, battery powered device, a sidecar that I could carry with my Psion and use as portable Linux terminal. I also managed to turn it into an Internet gateway, leading to some interesting experiences. The idea was straightforward: take a Pi Zero, add an RS232 board that already handles the null modem side, add a Lipo battery, power management and charging, and print a case for it. It’s taken a few months from initial idea to final design, but I’m happy the result, it’s usable and practical, and you can build one too. This is incredibly cool.
Back in the ’90s and very early 2000s, a whole market segment of computers existed that we don’t really talk about anymore today: the UNIX workstation. They were non-x86 machines running one of the many commercial UNIX variants, and were used for the very high end of computing. They were expensive, unique, different, and quite often incredibly overengineered. Countless companies made and sold these UNIX workstation. SGI was a big player in this market, with their fancy, colourful machines with MIPS processors running IRIX. There was also Sun Microsystems (and Oracle in the tail end), selling ever more powerful UltraSPARC workstations running Solaris. Industry legend DEC sold Alpha machines running Digital UNIX (later renamed to Tru64 UNIX when DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998). IBM of course also sold UNIX workstations, powered by their PowerPC architecture and AIX operating system. As x86 became ever more powerful and versatile, and with the rise of Linux as a capable UNIX replacement and the adoption of the NT-based versions of Windows, the days of the UNIX workstations were numbered. A few years into the new millennium, virtually all traditional UNIX vendors had ended production of their workstations and in some cases even their associated architectures, with a lacklustre collective effort to move over to Intel’s Itanium – which didn’t exactly go anywhere and is now nothing more than a sour footnote in computing history. Approaching roughly 2010, all the UNIX workstations had disappeared. Development of MIPS, UltraSPARC (for workstations), Alpha, and others had all been wound down, and with a few exceptions, the various commercial UNIX variants started to languish in extended support purgatory, and by now, they’re all pretty much dead (save for Solaris). Users and industries moved on to x86 on the hardware side, and Linux, Windows, and in some cases, Mac OS X on the software side. I’ve always been fascinated by these UNIX workstations. They were this mysterious, unique computers running software that was entirely alien to me, and they were impossibly expensive. Over the years, I’ve owned exactly one of these machines – a Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris 9 – and I remember enjoying that little machine greatly. I was a student living in a tiny apartment with not much money to spare, but back in those days, you couldn’t load a single page on an online auction website without stumbling over piles of Ultra 5s and other UNIX workstations, so they were cheap and plentiful. Even as my financial situation improved and money wasn’t short anymore, my apartment was still far too small to buy even more computers, especially since UNIX workstations tended to be big and noisy. Fast forward to the 2020s, however, and everything’s changed. My house has plenty of space, and I even have my own dedicated office for work and computer nonsense, so I’ve got more than enough room to indulge and buy UNIX workstations. It was time to get back in the saddle. But soon I realised times had changed. Over the past few years, I have come to learn that If you want to get into buying, using, and learning from UNIX workstations today, you’ll run into various problems which can roughly be filed into three main categories: hardware availability, operating system availability, and third party software availability. I’ll walk through all three of these and give some examples that I’ve encountered, most of them based on the purchase of a UNIX workstation from a vendor I haven’t mentioned yet: Hewlett Packard. Hardware availability: a tulip for a house The first place most people would go to in order to buy a classic UNIX workstation is eBay. Everyone’s favourite auction site and online marketplace is filled with all kinds of UNIX workstations, from the ’80s all the way up to the final machines from the early 2000s. You’ll soon notice, however, that pricing seems to have gone absolutely – pardon my Gaelic – absolutely batshit insane. Are you interested in a Sun Ultra 45, from 2005, without any warranty and excluding shipping? That’ll be anywhere from €1500 to €2500. Or are you more into SGI, and looking to buy a a 175 Mhz Indigo 2 from the mid-’90s? Better pony up at least €1250. Something as underpowered as a Sun Ultra 10 from 1998 will run for anything between €700 and €1300. Getting something more powerful like an SGI Fuel? Forget about it. Going to refurbishers won’t help you much either. Just these past few days I was in contact with a refurbisher here in Sweden who is charging over €4000 for a Sun Ultra 45. For a US perspective, a refurbisher like UNIX HQ, for instance, has quite a decent selection of machines, but be ready to shell out $2000 for an IBM IntelliStation POWER 285 running AIX, $1300 for a Sun Blade 2500, or $2000-$2500 for an SGI Fuel, to list just a few. Of course, these prices are without shipping or possible customs fees. It will come as no surprise that shipping these machines is expensive. Shipping a UNIX workstation from the US – where supply is relatively ample – to Europe often costs more than the computer itself, easily doubling your total costs. On top of that, there’s the crapshoot lottery of customs fees, which, depending on the customs official’s mood, can really be just about anything. I honestly have no idea why pricing has skyrockted as much as it has. Machines like these were far, far cheaper only 5-10 years ago, but it seems something happened that pushed them up – quite a few of them are definitely not rare, so I doubt rarity is the cause. Demand can’t exactly be high either, so I doubt there’s so many people buying these that they’re forcing the price to go up. I do have a few theories, such as some machines being absolutely required in some specific niche somewhere and sellers just sitting on them until one breaks and must be replaced, whatever the cost,
Google is working on upgrading its Nest Audio smart speaker to run on the company’s own Fuchsia operating system. For the last few years, Google has been steadily working on switching its Nest Hub smart displays from running on “Cast OS” to the company’s in-house OS, Fuchsia. The original Nest Hub was the first to make the jump in 2021, and the Nest Hub Max made a similar move earlier this year. In all likelihood, the Nest Hub 2nd Gen should get its Fuchsia update soon too. The slow, deliberate, and calculated rollout of Fuchsia continues.
Intel recently announced a big driver update for their Arc GPUs on Windows, because their DirectX 9 performance wasn’t as good as it could have been. Turns out, they’re using code from the open source DXVK which is part of Steam Play Proton. DXVK translates Direct3D 9, Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11 to Vulkan. Primarily written for Wine, the Windows compatibility layer, which is what Proton is made from (Proton is what the majority of games on Steam Deck run through). However, it also has a Native implementation for Linux and it can be used even on Windows too. So it’s not a big surprise to see this. Heck, even NVIDIA use DXVK for RTX Remix. Windows gamers benefiting from open source technology for gaming on Linux. My my, the turntables!
The story of PostScript has many different facets. It is a story about profound changes in human literacy as well as a story of trade secrets within source code. It is a story about the importance of teams, and of geometry. And it is a story of the motivations and educations of engineer-entrepreneurs. The Computer History Museum is excited to publicly release, for the first time, the source code for the breakthrough printing technology, PostScript. We thank Adobe, Inc. for their permission and support, and John Warnock for championing this release. There’s definitely progress being made when it comes to open sourcing old software, but we’ve still got a long, long way to go for this to become the norm – as it should be.
End-to-end encryption is coming to most of iCloud with a new optional feature called Advanced Data Protection, according to Apple’s announcement on Wednesday. Previously, 14 data categories within iCloud were protected. This new feature brings that count to 23, including photos, notes, voice memos, reminders, Safari bookmarks, and iCloud backups of the contents of your devices. Not everything is encrypted in this way, though. Critically, calendar and mail are untouched here. Apple says they are not covered “because of the need to interoperate with the global email, contacts, and calendar systems.” Good step, and something every cloud provider ought to be offering.
FreeBSD 12.4 has been released. This is a maintenance release of the older stable branch, and contains the usual package updates, bug fixes, and other relatively minor changes.
This release features work-in-progress OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all current Apple M-series systems. That’s enough for hardware acceleration with desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE. It’s also enough for older 3D games, like Quake3 and Neverball. While there’s always room for improvement, the driver is fast enough to run all of the above at 60 frames per second at 4K. Please note: these drivers have not yet passed the OpenGL (ES) conformance tests. There will be bugs! Increasingly impressive work.
As you may already have noticed we have released new ISO and USB images for OpenIndiana Hipster some days ago. As usual we have received many updates via illumos-gate, eg. the latest Intel and AMD CPU microcode updates, the latest time zone changes and lots of enhancements for BHyVe and the internal SMB server. Does anybody still legitimately use any of the variants of Solaris? It certainly had a moment in the final days of Sun, but ever since Oracle got their hands on it it’s been pretty much strangled to death, it seems.
Ars Technica: Guess what has happened! Łukasz Siewierski, a member of Google’s Android Security Team, has a post on the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative (AVPI) issue tracker detailing leaked platform certificate keys that are actively being used to sign malware. The post is just a list of the keys, but running each one through APKMirror or Google’s VirusTotal site will put names to some of the compromised keys: Samsung, LG, and Mediatek are the heavy hitters on the list of leaked keys, along with some smaller OEMs like Revoview and Szroco, which makes Walmart’s Onn tablets. These companies somehow had their signing keys leaked to outsiders, and now you can’t trust that apps that claim to be from these companies are really from them. To make matters worse, the “platform certificate keys” that they lost have some serious permissions. I tend to not really focus on security issues, because more often than not they amount to baseless scaremongering for clicks (or worse, to scare people into buying antivirus software), but this one seems possibly serious enough to warrant attention. I’m just not entirely sure how bad this can actually turn out to be, and the vague statements from Samsung, Google, and other sure aren’t helping in cleaning up the confusion.
Traditionally, updates on Linux systems are controlled by the user. You get an icon in the system tray that looks important; you click on it; it asks you if you want to install updates; you say “yes” or “no”; updates are applied, or not; when you next restart any applications that you have running that were updated, the new version is picked up. Data isn’t lost, because updates don’t restart the application. You can (and do) update the Linux kernel in this way, and your computer just stays up (usually running on the old version of the kernel until you next restart.) Mechanisms have been added over time to allow auto updates to take place for critical security patches (“unattended upgrades”) but these have typically to be opt in. And again, they don’t restart running applications. Snap breaks this contract. The update channel for Snap is independent from the KDE updater (on Kubuntu), and seemingly the Gnome updater (on Ubuntu). If you consent to applying updates from the general system tray “updates needed” notification, Snap updates are not included; they’re not even listed in the pending notifications from the system tray. Snap updates only happen when the Snap updater is running, either if the application is not running or after the period of time required to force updates has expired. Snap updates happen without consent. I would really, really suggest moving away from Ubuntu, and opting for the countless better alternatives instead, like Fedora (the best desktop, in my view), Linux Mint (a great desktop, but a bit more conservative than Fedora), any of the Arch derivatives (for bleeding edge and tons of fooling around with AUR), or Void (for those of us with taste). Or any, any of the others. Ubuntu just does not seem to have its users’ best interests at heart, and Snap is the best example of that.
This is a problem for all of us. Most people who can afford one have bought their iPhone or iPad already. The programmers already have their MacBooks. And while everyone will need to buy replacements at some point, that’s a steady-state or at best low-growth business. When Apple says more, it means the Wall Street kind of “more”: a hockey stick of growth. Which means, Apple needs to find growth outside its usual business. And these days, that means: advertising. And online advertising requires: surveillance. And a surveillance-enabled ad business leads, inevitably, to deceiving customers. It’s already happening, and like the boiling frog (which is not actually how it works – the frog will definitely jump out if it’s being slowly boiled; the tiny detail not part of most retellings is that the researcher had removed the frogs’ brains), Apple users are slowly being prepped for slaughter.
In Android 13, about 21% of all new native code (C/C++/Rust) is in Rust. There are approximately 1.5 million total lines of Rust code in AOSP across new functionality and components such as Keystore2, the new Ultra-wideband (UWB) stack, DNS-over-HTTP3, Android’s Virtualization framework (AVF), and various other components and their open source dependencies. These are low-level components that require a systems language which otherwise would have been implemented in C++. To date, there have been zero memory safety vulnerabilities discovered in Android’s Rust code. We don’t expect that number to stay zero forever, but given the volume of new Rust code across two Android releases, and the security-sensitive components where it’s being used, it’s a significant result. It demonstrates that Rust is fulfilling its intended purpose of preventing Android’s most common source of vulnerabilities. Historical vulnerability density is greater than 1/kLOC (1 vulnerability per thousand lines of code) in many of Android’s C/C++ components (e.g. media, Bluetooth, NFC, etc). Based on this historical vulnerability density, it’s likely that using Rust has already prevented hundreds of vulnerabilities from reaching production. These numbers don’t lie.
So there you have it: recommending idly Secure Boot for all systems requiring intermediate security level accomplishes nothing, except maybe giving more work to system administrators that are recompiling their kernel, while offering exactly no measurable security against many threats if UEFI Administrative password and MOK Manager passwords are not set. This is especially true for laptop systems where physical access cannot be prevented for obvious reasons. For servers in colocation, the risk of physical access is not null. And finally for many servers, the risk of a rogue employee somewhere in the supply chain, or the maintenance chain cannot be easily ruled out. The author makes a compelling case, but my knowledge on this topic is too limited to confidently present this article as a good one. I’ll leave it to those among us with more experience on this subject to shoot holes in the article, or to affirm it.
As you look around for a new social media platform, I implore you, only use one that is a part of the World Wide Web. If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way. Consign that app to oblivion. Yep.
“Raspberry Pi boards are hard to get, probably also next year,” says Andreas Spiess, single-board enthusiast and YouTuber, in his distinctive Swiss accent. He’s not wrong. Spiess says he and his fellow Pi devotees need “a strategy to survive” without new boards, so he suggests looking in one of the least captivating, most overlooked areas of computing: used, corporate-minded thin client PCs. Spiess’ Pi replacements, suggested and refined by many of his YouTube commenters and Patreon subscribers, are Fujitsu Futros, Lenovo ThinkCentres, and other small systems (some or all of which could be semantically considered “thick clients” or simply “mini PCs,” depending on your tastes and retro-grouch sensibilities). They’re the kind of systems you can easily find used on eBay, refurbished on Amazon Renewed, or through other enterprise and IT asset disposition sources. They’re typically in good shape, given their use and environment. And compared to single-board enthusiast systems, many more are being made and replaced each year. A project I want to undertake is set up an UltraSPARC machine, and then tie several Sun Rays to them. I also want to mess around with using Linux as the host for several thin clients – they’re so cheap, and it seems like they’re really fun to mess around with.
There is still a long road ahead! The UAPI that we are using right now is still a prototype, and there are a lot of new features that need to be added or redesigned in order to support a full Vulkan driver in the future. Since Linux mandates that the UAPI needs to remain stable and backwards compatible across versions (unlike macOS), that means that the kernel driver will not be heading upstream for many months, until we have a more complete understanding of the GPU rendering parameters and have implemented all the new design features needed by Vulkan. The current UAPI also has performance limitations… it can’t even run GPU rendering concurrently with CPU processing yet! And of course there is still a lot of work to do on the userspace side, improving conformance and performance and adding support for more GL extensions and features! Some features like tesselation and geometry shaders are very tricky to implement (since they need to be partially or fully emulated), so don’t expect full OpenGL 3.2+ for quite a long time. This article is a detailed look at the work done by Asahi Lina to create a Linux GPU driver for Apple’s M1, after Alyssa Rosenzweig reverse engineered the M1 GPU on macOS. This is a tour de force of excellence, and every current and future M1/M2 Linux user should be thankful for the amazing work these people are doing.
Highlights of this release include initial gesture support with double-tap to wake for selected devices, improvements to fingerprint unlock by allowing more backoff time between read retries, as well as support for media buttons on headsets for most Ubuntu Phone devices. In addition, the Ubuntu Touch OTA-24 update adds support for handling the sms:// URL scheme for properly opening the Messaging app, adds Full HD 1080p support to the Aethercast implementation, improves SMS and MMS support, and adds various performance tweaks to the Mir-Android-Platform. I’m kind of surprised the current releases are still based on Ubuntu 16.04 – that’s quite an old release. They are working on upgrading the base to 20.04, and the switchover should happen relatively soon.
Yes, I am playing Dope Wars on a Palm Pilot inside my iPhone. It’s thanks to The Internet Archive, which is once again launching a giant collection of software you can instantly play on any web browser, up to and including your touchscreen-equipped phone. There are currently 565 classic Palm apps in all, including games, widgets, and even free trials from both the greyscale and color eras. This is probably the easiest way to experience Palm OS applications now. I will still opt for any of my dozen or so real devices, but having so many applications safe and sound on the Archive is amazingly awesome.
Multi-factor authentication is ripe for disruption. SMS 2FA is inherently defective. Phone authenticators get stolen. Security tokens get lost. But just try misplacing a Commodore SX-64. And any thief who tries to grab it and run gets a free hernia truss from the prison infirmary. I want to see someone carry an SX-64 into a coffee shop to authenticate something. Please.
I occasionally do talks about curl. In these talks I often include a few slides that say something about curl’s coverage and presence on different platforms. Mostly to boast of course, but also to help explain to the audience how curl has manged to reach its ten billion installations. Curl is literally everywhere – even on another planet.
Via Hackaday: We’re used to the so-called “Hackintoshes”, non-Apple hardware running MacOS. One we featured recently was even built into the case of a Nintendo Wii. But Dandu has gone one better than that, by running MacOS on an unmodified Wii, original Nintendo hardware (French, Google Translate link). How has this seemingly impossible task been achieved? Seasoned Mac enthusiasts will remember the days when Apple machines used PowerPC processors, and the Wii uses a PowerPC chip that’s a close cousin of those used in the Mac G3 series of computers. Since the Wii can run a Linux-based OS, it can therefore run Mac-on-Linux, providing in theory an environment in which it can host one of the PowerPC versions of MacOS. So it’s not really running MacOS 9.2.2 directly on the hardware, but it’s close enough. Impressive work.
Apple currently brings in roughly $4 billion from advertising and is forecasted to bring in as much as $30 billion by 2026. While these amounts are an order of magnitude smaller than the $210 billion Google made from its ad services, they represent a change in philosophy for Apple, which only earned around $300 million for ads in 2017. This new emphasis on advertising also undermines Apple’s claims about privacy with its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature and its “Privacy. That’s iPhone” ad campaign. In fact, it appears ATT may have been more about blocking competitors than protecting user privacy. Since Apple introduced ATT, its ad revenue has skyrocketed, leading German regulators to investigate Apple to see if it’s abusing its power. Apple has one of the most valuable repositories of credit card information and user behaviour data in the world, and after years of sanctimonious lying about how much they care about privacy, all bets are off now. iOs is already infested with ads, and it’s only going to get worse. It’s not like you’re going to switch platforms anyway at this point.
Music Studio is a Windows-based SID music creator software. For an accurate C64 sound, it utilises the newest RESID-FP emulation available, both old (6581) and new (8580) SID chips. MS2 is capable of creating 1x speed tunes and many SID chip parameters can be edited directly using the various commands. Classic and new C64 sounds can be created with envelope parameters that can be set up in few simple steps. While I’m sure purists will greatly prefer real hardware, the cold and harsh truth is that the number of real, authentic Commodore 64 models is slowly running out, and there’s only so many Adrian Blacks in the world capable of repairing the few that can actually be repaired. Emulation – even for specific features of the C64 such as its sound capabilities – will make the C64 immortal.
Intel has officially revealed its Intel On Demand program (opens in new tab) that will activate select accelerators and features of the company’s upcoming Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processor. The new pay-as-you-go program will allow Intel to reduce the number of SKUs it ships while still capitalizing on the technologies it has to offer. Furthermore, its clients will be able to upgrade their machines without replacing actual hardware or offering additional services to their clients. Intel’s upcoming Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processors are equipped with various special-purpose accelerators and security technologies that all customers do not need at all times. To offer such end-users additional flexibility regarding investments, Intel will deliver them to buy its CPUs with those capabilities disabled but turn them on if they are needed at some point. The Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) technology will also allow Intel to sell fewer CPU models and then enable its clients or partners to activate certain features if needed (to use them on-prem or offer them as a service). On the one hand, in a perfect world where people and companies are fair, this seems like a great idea – it allows you to buy one processor (or, in the datacentre case, one batch of processors) and then unlock additional features and capabilities as your needs change. Sadly, the world is not perfect and people and companies are not fair, so this is going be ripe for abuse. We all know it.
We have a lot to show since the 0.7.0 release! This release, care has been taken to ensure real hardware is working, i686 support has been added, features like audio and preliminary multi-display support have been enabled, and the boot and install infrastructure has been simplified and made more robust. I highly recommend skimming through the changes listed below before jumping into the images, if you want more details. It is also recommended to read through the Redox OS book if you want more information on how to build and use Redox OS. Redox OS is written in Rust, and created and maintained by System76 Principal Engineer Jeremy Soller. There’s a ton of changes in this release – far too many to list here – and while native installation is possible, there’s always going to be struggles with hardware support for any alternative operating system.
Atlas is a Windows version designed for gamers. Atlas users can enjoy higher framerate, lowered input delay & latency. Great for people on a low-end system, or high-end gaming machine. I had no idea people still did this – create custom versions of Windows ISOs and try to pawn them off as something special. The legality of this is more than dubious, of course, and you can probably achieve the same results with some of the countless scripts that are out there that also remove services, telemetry and pointless applications.
Today the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in the Microsoft Store is dropping its “Preview” label and becomes generally available with our latest release! We are also making the Store version of WSL the default for new users who run wsl --install and easily upgradeable by running wsl --update for existing users. Using the Store version of WSL allows you to get updates to WSL much faster compared to when it was a Windows component. In response to the WSL community’s requests, WSL in the Store will now also be available on Windows 10 in addition to Windows 11. So, Windows 10 users will also be able to enjoy all of the latest features for WSL including systemd and Linux GUI app support! I obviously have no hard data on this, but I feel like WSL is actually quite popular among developers, as it gives Windows users easy access to a very popular tool chain and development platform. I don’t know just how transferable knowledge and experience gained through WSL is to “real” Linux, but it seems close enough.
The first computer I owned shipped with 128 KiB of RAM and to this day I’m still jarred by the idea that applications can run out of memory given that even 15-year-old machines often shipped with 4 GiB of memory. And yet it’s one of the most common causes of instability experienced by users and in the case of Firefox the biggest source of crashes on Windows. A detailed technical explanation of why Windows’s memory management – and only Windows’s – is causing so many crashes for Firefox, as well as a solution they found to address the problem.
Time for another overdue progress report! This month’s update is packed with new hardware support, new features, and fixes for longstanding pain points, as well as a new bleeding-edge kernel branch with long-awaited support for suspend and the display controller! Asahi Linux is the project bringing Linux to Apple’s M1 and M2 platform, and they continue to make great strides. I’m still skeptical about how wise it is to buy expensive hardware you have zero control over to run an operating system not explicitly endorsed, but y’all are smart enough to make those calls on your own.
We’ll start our conversation by saying that DOS/4GW is a DOS extender. That means DOS/4GW is a program responsible for adding some useful stuff on top of the vanilla DOS kernel you have installed on your system. And look, I know this does not really answer anything yet, but we’ll get there. Let’s begin our journey trying to understand why DOS needs extending in the first place. I definitely remember seeing DOS/4GW a lot when playing MS-DOS games back in the ’90s, but I had entirely forgotten about it. This article is from 2021, and explains what it is, and why it was needed.
This project is a Mastodon client written in Visual Basic 6. It works on Windows 95 and higher (Windows 10/11 untested). Yes. Belgian developer Maartje Eyskens made a Mastodon client for Windows 9x. Amazing.
Out of the blue my Steam started picking a random font I had in my user fonts dir: Virgil, the Excalidraw font. That triggered me all sorts of emotions, ranging from laugh to total incredulity. I initially thought the root cause was a random derping from Valve but the Internet seemed quiet about it, so the unreasonable idea that it might have been my fault surfaced. Who doesn’t love a good technology mystery story?
The HP-UX Porting and Archive Centre was established in August 1992 in the Department of Computer Science at Liverpool University in the United Kingdom, but has been run by Liverpool-based Connect Internet Solutions Limited since 1995. Its primary aim is to make public domain, freeware and Open Source software more readily available to users of Hewlett-Packard UNIX systems. The archive began with an initial collection of 150 packages, all of which had been successfully compiled and tested locally by staff at the Liverpool centre before being installed and made available on the archive. The centre continues to act as a porting body as well as an archive site – all software held in the archive has been verified to run successfully on HP-UX PA-RISC (and now Itanium) systems. As of October 2012, the Centre held over 1,500 packages! For reasons that will become apparent somewhere in the coming weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time exploring and using HP-UX, and the HP-UX Porting and Archive Centre is one of those things that the four enthusiasts running HP-UX might find useful. It’s a vast collection of open source and freeware software built for HP-UX, installable either manually or using a specific script to resolve dependencies. This is one heck of a labour of love, considering HP-UX’, shall we say, unpopular status. Sadly, the Archive has a major limitation, one that I ran into: since 2017, only the very latest version of HP-UX – 11.31, also known as 11i v3 – is supported, meaning packages for the version I’m running, 11.11 or 11i v1, have long ago been deleted. On top of that, since 2020, all PA-RISC packages are marked as deprecated, meaning they’re no longer updated and will, at some point, be deleted too, leaving only Itanium 2 packages up for download. Using HP-UX as an enthusiast is one hell of a challenge, I can tell you that.
Earlier in the week, some Windows 11 Dev Channel users spotted Start menu ads/promos encouraging them to back up their data to OneDrive, sign up for a Microsoft account, and complete their profile. This obviously opened the door to lots of conversations over on social media platforms such as Twitter as well as the comments section on our own coverage as the majority of readers proceeded to bash Microsoft for pushing what they believe to be advertisements in their OS. To be fair, this backlash isn’t surprising. Microsoft has previously been caught red-handed testing advertisements for Microsoft Editor in the File Explorer. At that time, the company quickly removed them, claiming that they were not meant to be published externally. Even then, I expressed concern that while the banner ads were published accidentally this time, the real problem here is that Microsoft is definitely playing around with this idea and there’s no knowing when the tech giant decides that it’s the right time to green light this initiative for the public. It’s not going to matter. People who (think they) need Windows will keep using Windows, keep taking the user-hostile nonsense, because they don’t know any better. Windows users are a goldmine waiting to be split open and rushed, and Microsoft knows it.
It’s undeniably good for the Arm Windows app ecosystem to have a viable, decently specced PC that is usable as an everyday computer. The Dev Kit 2023 is priced to move, so there may be some developers who buy one just for the hell of it, which might have some positive trickle-down effects for the rest of the ecosystem. Because eventually, the Windows-on-Arm project will need to develop some tangible benefit for the people who choose to use it. What you’re getting with an Arm Windows device right now is essentially the worst of both x86 and Arm—compatibility problems without lower power use and heat to offset them and so-so performance to boot. Apple has cracked all three of these things; Windows and Qualcomm are struggling to do any of them. I’m just not entirely sure who Windows on ARM is supposed to be for. I want it to succeed – the more choice the better, and x86 needs an ass-kicking – but I don’t think the current crop of Windows on ARM devices are even remotely worth it. Either Qualcomm finally gets its act together and comes up with an SoC to rival Apple’s M series, or Microsoft takes matters into its own hands. Either way, they’re going to need to do something about the performance of x86 code on Windows on ARM.
Plan 9 is an operating system designed by Bell Labs. It’s the OS they wrote after Unix, with the benefit of hindsight. It is the most interesting operating system that you’ve never heard of, and, in my opinion, the best operating system design to date. Even if you haven’t heard of Plan 9, the designers of whatever OS you do use have heard of it, and have incorporated some of its ideas into your OS. Plan 9 is a research operating system, and exists to answer questions about ideas in OS design. As such, the Plan 9 experience is in essence an exploration of the interesting ideas it puts forth. Most of the ideas are small. Many of them found a foothold in the broader ecosystem — UTF-8, goroutines, /proc, containers, union filesystems, these all have their roots in Plan 9 — but many of its ideas, even the good ones, remain unexplored outside of Plan 9. As a consequence, Plan 9 exists at the center of a fervor of research achievements which forms a unique and profoundly interesting operating system. I’ve never used Plan 9, but whenever I read about I feel like it makes sense, like that’s how things are supposed to be. I’m sure its approaches present their own unique challenges, problems, and idiosyncrasies, but the idealised reality in articles like these make me want to jump in.
The Zeal Operating System is a modernized, professional fork of the 64-bit Temple Operating System. Guiding principles of development include transparency, full user control, and adherence to public-domain/open-source implementations. ZealOS strives to be simple, documented, and require as little of a knowledge gap as possible. One person should be able to comprehend the entire system in at least a semi-detailed way within a few days of study. Simplify, don’t complicate; make accessible, don’t obfuscate. Yes, somebody picked up Terry Davis‘ baton and ran with it. This makes me happy – it seemed wrong for TempleOS to remain but an inanimate memorial.
The 8086 microprocessor is one of the most important chips ever created; it started the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and server computing today. I’ve been reverse-engineering its circuitry by studying its silicon die. One of the most unusual circuits I found is a “bootstrap driver”, a way to boost internal signals to improve performance. This circuit consists of just three NMOS transistors, amplifying an input signal to produce an output signal, but it doesn’t resemble typical NMOS logic circuits and puzzled me for a long time. Eventually, I stumbled across an explanation: the “bootstrap driver” uses the transistor’s capacitance to boost its voltage. It produces control pulses with higher current and higher voltage than otherwise possible, increasing performance. In this blog post, I’ll attempt to explain how the tricky bootstrap driver circuit works. I don’t fully understand all the details, but I do grasp the main point here. This is quite an ingenious design.
The AMD EPYC 9004 series, codenamed “Genoa” is nothing short of a game-changer. We use that often in the industry, but this is not a 15-25% generational improvement. The new AMD EPYC Genoa changes the very foundation of what it means to be a server. This is a 50-60% (or more) per-socket improvement, meaning we get a 3:2 or 2:1 consolidation just from a generation ago. If you are coming from 3-5 year-old Xeon Scalable (1st and 2nd Gen) servers to EPYC, the consolidation potential is even more immense, more like 4:1. This new series is about much more than just additional cores or a few new features. AMD EPYC Genoa is a game-changer, and we are going to go in-depth as to why in this article. These are absolutely monster processors, and widen the already existing gap between AMD and Intel in the server space even more.
We are bringing process filtering to Task Manager. This is the top feature request from our users to filter/search for processes. You can filter either using the binary name, PID or publisher name. The filter algorithm matches the context keyword with all possible matches and displays them on the current page. The filter is also applied as you switch between pages. You can also use the keyboard shortcut ALT + F to focus on the filter box. This is a helpful feature if you want to single out a process or a group of processes and want to take action or just monitor the performance of the filtered processes. I am baffled by how slowly new, actually useful features seem to be added to Windows these days. Weren’t all the changes in development and release cycles supposed to speed up the development of Windows? It feels like it’s a small trickle of minor features here and there, that then get massive press attention because… Well, at least something is happening. But nice, I guess. A feature present on virtually every other platform for decades.
OSNews now has an official Mastodon account. It’s a bot account that mirrors our main RSS feed, so it’s a great way to keep up with our stories if you’re using Mastodon. This official Mastodon account joins my own personal Mastodon account and that of our web master and developer, Adam.
On Monday, a German Redditor named c-wizz announced that they had found a very rare 66-year-old Librascope LGP-30 computer (and several 1970 DEC PDP-8/e computers) in their grandparents’ basement. The LGP-30, first released in 1956, is one of only 45 manufactured in Europe and may be best known as the computer used by “Mel” in a famous piece of hacker lore. This is the vintage computing version of finding a 33 Stradale in a shed in the Italian countryside.
Microsoft is now promoting some of its products in the sign-out flyout menu that shows up when clicking the user icon in the Windows 11 start menu. This new Windows 11 “feature” was discovered by Windows enthusiast Albacore, who shared several screenshots of advertisement notifications in the Accounts flyout. The screenshots show that Microsoft promotes the OneDrive file hosting service and prods users to create or complete their Microsoft accounts. Apple and Microsoft are actively ruining their operating systems just to squeeze a few more lousy coin out of their trapped users. What dreadful places to work they must be, with bean counters looking over every programmer’s shoulder to find ever more places to stuff in ads.
The PowerStack was one of the Motorola Computer Group’s entries into the personal computer (PC) market around the time the Microsoft Windows/Intel x86 juggernaut was stumbling with their mass market Windows 3.11 replacement. It’s a compact, modular, efficient platform featuring IBM/Motorola’s PowerPC CPUs as well as best-in-class contemporary interfaces like PCI and SCSI. A compute element could be stacked with other modular I/O and storage cases to expand its capabilities without having to rehome the computer in a larger chassis. I had never heard of this machine before, illustrating just how much random non-x86 machines were produced in the ’90s. This one definitely looks more out there than most, and most likely utterly impossible to find anywhere.
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