OSnews

Google’s homegrown Fuchsia operating system has taken another step closer to being broadly usable by gaining the full Google Chrome browser experience. It’s been possible to access the web in a very limited way on Fuchsia for quite some time now via the operating system’s “Simple Browser” app – which was powered by the Chromium engine under the hood. While usable, this “browser” didn’t offer the usual necessities like an address bar or tabs. Mid last year, we reported that Google had begun efforts to bring the full Chrome browser experience to Fuchsia. As first spotted by oldschool-51 of Fuchsia’s Reddit community, these efforts have come to fruition in recent days, with Simple Browser being replaced in Fuchsia’s app list with “Chromium.” It’s steps like these that show that Google is serious about Fuchsia. For whatever that’s worth.

Gadgets are getting too thin, again. These past few weeks saw some of the latest victims of the seemingly unending drive towards making our devices as thin as possible, no matter the consequences. Samsung’s Galaxy S22 and S22 Plus — what will undoubtedly be some of the most popular Android phones of the year — are thinner than last year’s models and held back by disappointing battery life. The new Dell XPS 15 is “exceptionally thin and light” but barely lasts four hours on a charge and runs nearly as hot as the sun. And the OnePlus 10 Pro is a flagship smartphone that can somehow be snapped in half with your bare hands. It seems that despite over a decade of chasing the thinnest, lightest phones and computers around to the detriment of battery life, cooling, and durability, companies still haven’t learned their lessons. I prefer a few more millimeters if it means better heat dissipation, less fan noise, and better battery life. I’m not entirely sure if consumers in general prefer thinness over these other aspects, but I doubt they do.

At 7.7×7.7×1.4 inches, the Mac mini is a tiny desktop. When the form factor debuted in 2010, it was pretty impressive. But 12 years later, with mini PCs like the Intel NUC measuring 4.6×4.4×1.5 inches, the Mac mini doesn’t feel all that mini anymore. As it turns out, the PC is packing some extra baggage, and by getting rid of some of those parts—like an overly powerful internal power supply unit (PSU)—an enthusiast has been able to rebuild the system with a 28 percent reduction in volume while allegedly keeping the same performance as the original machine. Since I’m no archeologist who specialises in prehistoric measurement “systems”, I have no idea what those weird, alien measurements mean, but the pictures and video are clear: this is a really tiny M1 Mac Mini now. And the “enthusiast” is Quinn Nelson, all-around good guy.

Oh, oh, oh Samsung, up to their usual tricks. Samsung phones ship with a Game Optimizing Service app pre-installed as a system app — we confirmed it’s installed on the Galaxy S22+, as pictured below. It cannot be disabled. The app’s exact purpose isn’t described very well anywhere, but its name certainly implies the app is used to improve performance for games. However, as one Twitter user points out, with the backing of a lengthy thread from frustrated Samsung Galaxy owners in Korea (via Android Authority), Samsung seems to be using this app to “optimize” the performance of thousands of non-gaming apps. When an app is in the Game Optimizing Service list, its performance is limited, as demonstrated by a YouTuber who changed the package name of the 3DMark benchmark app to trick Samsung’s software into throttling it, and the results are pretty telling. In and of itself there’s really nothing wrong with managing the performance of various applications in order to preserve battery life. However, it has to be done transparently and openly, so that users can easily see what’s going on and disable any optimisations they’re not interested in. This kind of obfuscation by Samsung is deception, and simply should not be allowed.

This is the first in a series of articles about the history of Java on the Desktop, from my perspective as a developer who started working with Java in the late ‘90’s. I’m writing this, partly as a background for why I created jDeploy, a developer-friendly desktop deployment tool for Java. Despite the ominous tone of this article’s title, I believe that Java is a compelling platform for modern desktop applications. Stick around for the whole series to find out why. Isn’t Java still one of the languages every aspiring programmer learns in school?

The 22.02 release is dominated by three topics, the tightening and restructuring of the code base, device-driver infrastructure, and the transition of Sculpt OS towards a versatile toolkit for building specialized operating-system appliances. Genode’s release notes are always a sight to behold. Detailed, interesting, and always worth a read.

If you’ve already installed Windows 11 on unsupported devices, you might soon notice a new watermark on the desktop. The watermark, which appears above the taskbar clock, is similar to the “Windows is not activated” error, but it won’t affect apps, windows or web browsers. The desktop watermark simply states “system requirements not met” and it may irritate some users, but it should not come as too much of a surprise, as Microsoft previously warned users of possible ‘damage’. You have to feel sad for Windows users. Windows 7 really seems to have been the high point of Windows – ever since then it’s been one mess after another.

Linux themes and icon sets, inspired by other operating systems, have been around for as long as Linux has had a GUI. Some times those themes get pretty close to looking like the original. But… What if — what if — you could make your Linux desktop look almost exactly like Windows 95? It’s damn headerbars in GNOME (and now also Xfce) that mess this utopia up. They looks preposterously bad using these classic operating systems skins.

This blog series creates a small operating system in the Rust programming language. Each post is a small tutorial and includes all needed code, so you can follow along if you like. The source code is also available in the corresponding Github repository. A great way to learn Rust.

Now, a black screen could have multiple causes. The video driver may have crashed. Or the video driver could be working fine, but the compositor has crashed, so that nothing is being given to the video driver. Or the compositor could be working fine, but the shell has crashed, so the compositor has nothing to render. Or the shell could be running, but it simply forgot to put something on the screen. For that last case, the Windows 8 shell created a backstop window that sat at a layer below all of the other layers. If none of the other layers were present, then at least you got a backstop window. And in early debug builds, that backstop window contained an ASCII drawing of cats. That way, if you saw cats, you knew that you were in that last failure case: The shell is running but forgot to put something on the screen. Why cats? I approve of cats.

Neptune OS is a Windows NT personality of the seL4 microkernel. It implements what Microsoft calls the “NT Executive”, the upper layer of the Windows kernel NTOSKRNL.EXE, as a user process under the seL4 microkernel. The NT Executive implements the so-called NT Native API, the native system call interface of Windows upon which the more familiar Win32 API is built. These are exposed to the user mode via stub functions in NTDLL.DLL (a somewhat redundant name if you ask me) with names such as NtCreateProcess. The NT Executive is also responsible for the Windows kernel driver interface (known as the Windows driver model), which includes functions like IoConnectInterrupt and IoCallDriver. On Windows these are loaded into kernel mode and linked with the NTOSKRNL.EXE image. On Neptune OS, we run all the Windows kernel driver in user mode and they communicate with the NT Executive process via standard seL4 IPC primitives. The eventual goal of the Neptune OS project is to implement enough NT semantics such that a ReactOS user land can be ported under Neptune OS, as well as most ReactOS kernel drivers. In theory we should be able to achieve binary compatibility with native Windows executables provided that our implementation of the NT Native API is sufficiently faithful. We should also be able to achieve a high degree of source code compatibility with Windows kernel drivers. The main obstacle of achieving binary compatibility of kernel drivers is that many Windows kernel drivers do not follow the standard Windows driver communication protocol (ie. passing IRPs when you need to call another driver) and instead just pass pointers around and call into other drivers directly. In Neptune OS unless it’s a driver-minidriver pair we always run “kernel” drivers in their separate processes so it is not possible to do that. Very cool idea for a project, and awesome to see that they plan on integrating the work done by the ReactOS team.

We’re fast approaching the 40th birthday of the Sinclair Spectrum in 2022, and to keep myself occupied during COVID lockdowns I decided it would be a lot of fun to go back and re-visit the computer that started it all for me. I set about coding and building the infrastructure for a Spectrum-based community project (website at tnfs.markround.com) incorporating my current-day tools and knowledge, hence the title of this series of posts. The enterprise grew into a curious mix of old and new: Container-based pipelines with Ruby server-side components, all interacting with Spectrum BASIC and z80 assembly code, running on real 1980s hardware with a TCP/IP connection. If you’ve ever wondered how to unit-test Sinclair BASIC programs in GitOps pipelines running on Kubernetes clusters, this is the set of articles for you. I love it when people push these old machines to their limits with modern knowledge.

Late last year, we reviewed Slimbook’s KDE Slimbook, a special version of the Spanish’ Linux OEM’s 15″ laptop made in collaboration with the KDE project. I found it to be an excellent laptop, which left little to be desired for anyone in the market for a laptop of that size. It came with tons of power, unobtrusive fans, a great design, and a fair price tag. That being said – personally, I prefer smaller laptops. The KDE Slimbook’s 15 inches is just a bit too wide for me to be comfortable, and I’d much rather have something in the area of 13-14 inches. Luckily, Slimbook has an offering in this segment too: the Slimbook Executive. I’ve been using and testing one for the last few months, and I can confidently say the KDE Slimbook was not a fluke. Slimbook is running a special deal just for OSNews readers! When ordering your Slimbook Executive, use the promo code executive-laptop-osnews for a €150 discount!Note: OSNews does not receive any percentage of the sales using this promo code (or sales not using this promo code for that matter). The Slimbook Executive is 14″ ultrabook weighing in at a mere 1kg. Like the KDE Slimbook, it is also made from magnesium, which I find much more pleasant to handle than aluminium. I find magnesium more pleasant to touch and hold – it’s not as cold and harsh as aluminium, and it’s lighter too, which makes sense for an ultraportable laptop like this one. Instead of AMD, the Executive is powered by Intel’s Core i7-1165G7, with 4 cores and 8 threads, paired with Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics. It has two RAM slots for a maximum total of 64GB of RAM; my review unit was configured with 16GB of RAM, which is more than enough for a modern Linux distribution on such a portable machine. Despite being relatively small, the laptop has ample room for storage – it comes with two M.2 slots, one at PCIe 4x and one at PCIe 2x, for an out-of-factory configurable total of 4TB of storage. Unlike some of the competition from more established, larger OEMs, there’s no shortage of ports here. It has two USB-A 3.2 Gen1 ports, 1 USB-C 3.2 Gen2 port (with video-out through DisplayPort 1.4), one Thunderbolt 4 port (also with video-out through DisplayPort 1.4a, as well as charging support at 90+W) an SD card reader, a full-size HDMI port, and the usual Kensington lock, barrel plug, and headphone jack. The keyboard is more of a standard affair than the fancy, unique keyboard design found on the KDE Slimbook. This time around, it’s a regular chicklet-style keyboard in its magnesium frame, entirely familiar to anyone who has used an ultrabook in the past five to ten years. It’s excellently boring and familiar, just as you want a keyboard to be. It’s of course also backlit, and luckily does not have the readability issues some of the keys on the KDE Slimbook had. The touchpad feels great, has support for multitouch gestures, but it is of the common diving board design, meaning clicking gets progressively harder the higher you go on the trackpad. I really wish Apple’s fancy force touch trackpads made their way to othe rmanufacturers, too, since it feels nicer to have the same click feeling no matter where you click. The trackpad is huge, but not as over-the-top as Apple’s recent touchpads. The design of the laptop itself is very generic – unlike the KDE Slimbook, there are no flourishes here that set it apart from the rest of the competition (aside from the Slimbook logo, of course). I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing – this segment of the market is very mature, and this general design popularised by the MacBook Air is popular for a reason. Crazy and unique design makes sense on a gaming laptop, but on a small ultrabook, I prefer to keep it simple. The display is the real star of the show. It’s a 14″ screen with a resolution of 2880×1800 (Slimbook calls it 3K), and a refresh rate of 90Hz. Between 4K at 60Hz and 1080p at 144Hz, I think this is an excellent middle ground that avoids the pixelated look of 1080p at 14″, while still giving a decently smooth refresh rate. I definitely prefer this display over the 4K 60Hz panel on my Dell XPS 13, which is saying a lot, since that panel is one of the very best you could get at the time. There is one issue with the display I need to talk about. As it turns out, as soon as you try to install a kernel newer than roughly 5.11 or so, you’re going to see major screen flickering and corruption. After talking to Slimbook about this, it turns out this is because of an issue with panel self-refresh, a powersaving feature in Intel’s driver. This is known to cause issues in some cases, and the solution is to disable the feature using GRUB2 (add i915.enable_psr=0 to the kernel parameters). It’s important to note that you only have to apply this fix if you install a Linux distribution by yourself; the preinstalled Slimbook OS – a slightly modified version of Ubuntu – did not experience this problem, and I’m sure if you select any of the other preinstalled Linux distributions during the order process, Slimbook will also make sure the issue is handled before shipping. Slimbook has also told me they are currently beta testing a BIOS update that will fix this problem at the BIOS level, so once that update is released and installed, this issue will disappear. The battery life is exactly as you’d expect – I’m getting about 8 hours with office-type work, video watching, and some browsing. Using Slimbook’s own applications for managing the battery and processor states, you get some decent control over your performance and battery life, but a Debian-based distribution is required to make installation as easy as possible, since otherwise you’ll

The new FreeDOS 1.3 is now available for download! This contains a bunch of great new features and improvements since the 1.2 release, including: new FreeCOM 0.85a, new Kernel 2043 and an 8086 version with FAT32 support, floppy Edition now uses compression and requires about half as many diskettes, the return of networking, some new programs and games, many many many package updates, some updates and improvements to NLS, improved install process, especially with the MBR, some support to automatically set the COUNTRY.SYS information, improved CD initialization for the boot media and installed system… And much, much more! There’s lot of changes, fixes, and improvements in here, so go get it and play with it.

They hid it very well, two-thirds down a long list of changes and screenshots, but what was already inevitable is now reality. Similar to Windows 11 Home edition, Windows 11 Pro edition now requires internet connectivity during the initial device setup (OOBE) only. If you choose to setup device for personal use, MSA will be required for setup as well. You can expect Microsoft Account to be required in subsequent WIP flights. In other words, installing Windows 11 Pro will now, just like 11 Home, also require a Microsoft Account and thus an internet connection. You didn’t think pro users would be safe from big tech’s data hunger, now, did you?

After writing about the likely origins of IBM code page 852, I thought I should revisit the homegrown Czech alternative solution, the Kamenický brothers encoding and their keyboard driver. Its existence is well documented, and the so-called (somewhat misnamed) KEYBCS2 encoding even has its own Wikipedia article. The encoding itself lives on in various conversion tables, and utilities to convert text to or from the Kamenický encoding are easy enough to locate. But finding the actual KEYBCS2 utility turned out to be ridiculously difficult. I scoured the Internet for it. I could not find it. At all. I found a fair amount of text talking about it, but not the actual utility. A nice investigation into the past for a Sunday.

At the end of 2008, Firefox was flying high. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people online were using Mozilla’s browser to navigate the web. In Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, more than half of everyone going online was using Firefox. “Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy,” Ken Kovash, Mozilla’s president at the time, wrote in a blog post. Almost 15 years later, things aren’t so rosy. Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market—on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. “Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there’s no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. Mozilla’s own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022. “In the last couple years, what we’ve seen is actually a pretty substantial flattening,” Deckelmann adds. The decline and potential demise of Firefox is a massive problem that everybody seems to be kind of tiptoeing around, too afraid to acknowledge that if Firefox were indeed to disappear, we’d be royally screwed. We’d end up right back where we started 20 years ago, with Chrome being the new IE6, but with the big difference that Chrome isn’t bad enough yet for people to care. The situation is especially dire for the Linux world, and I feel like a lot of Linux users, developers, and distribution makers simply aren’t thinking about or preparing for a future where they can’t rely on Firefox anymore. Aside from Firefox, there really isn’t any browser out there that takes Linux seriously, and this is a big problem. Chrome is a disaster on Linux – it doesn’t even do something as basic as video acceleration unless you use one of the third party, custom maintained versions of Chromium, and, of course, it’s a vessel for Google’s advertising business. Things like the Gnome Browser or KDE’s Falkon can barely be taken seriously, and on top of that, are based on Apple’s WebKit, which isn’t a great position to be in either – and that’s it. There’s nothing else. The desktop Linux world is playing with fire by being so reliant on Firefox, and now that Firefox and Mozilla seem to be in some serious dire straits, I’m dumbfounded by the fact nobody seems to be at all preparing for what happens if Mozilla ever truly goes down.

Today, we’re announcing a multi-year initiative to build the Privacy Sandbox on Android, with the goal of introducing new, more private advertising solutions. Specifically, these solutions will limit sharing of user data with third parties and operate without cross-app identifiers, including advertising ID. We’re also exploring technologies that reduce the potential for covert data collection, including safer ways for apps to integrate with advertising SDKs. The Privacy Sandbox on Android builds on our existing efforts on the web, providing a clear path forward to improve user privacy without putting access to free content and services at risk. A plan for a plan that aims to please the advertising industry, an industry which at this point means Google, all built by Google. I might be mildly skeptical.

A few years ago, I got the crazy idea to try porting the Commodore 64 KERNAL and BASIC ROMs to the NES, since their CPUs are mostly the same. But I gave up when things got complicated with the PPU. Then a couple weeks ago, I saw that someone ported it to the Atari 1200XL, so I decided I’d give it another shot. This time, I was able to make a (mostly) working system. Quite impressive.

Today, we’re excited to announce early access to a new version of Chrome OS bringing the benefits of Chrome OS to PCs and Macs. Chrome OS Flex is the cloud-first, fast, easy-to manage, and secure operating system for PCs and Macs. Learn more below, try it out, and share your feedback to help us shape this product. It’s basically Chrome OS for any PC or Mac you might have lying around. Other parties offered similar Chrome OS-based systems for non-Chromebook hardware, but this is the first time Google itself offers it as a first-class citizen of the Chrome OS ecosystem.

Chrome and Firefox will reach version 100 in a couple of months. This has the potential to cause breakage on sites that rely on identifying the browser version to perform business logic. This post covers the timeline of events, the strategies that Chrome and Firefox are taking to mitigate the impact, and how you can help. Just skip 9.

Haiku’s latest activity report is here, and while there’s a lot of stuff in there – as usual – I think the Gtk work stands out this month. After all that work, GTK3 worked “well enough” that it seemed ready for general consumption (or at least testing), so waddlesplash committed the necessary changes to HaikuPorts for Xlibe to be packaged, and then GTK3, and then finally the first GTK3 application: Inkscape. Already, GIMP has followed closely on its tail thanks to 3dEyes (with some quick fixes to Xlibe done by waddlesplash for it), and more GTK3 applications are sure to follow once the HaikuPorts team gets caught up to speed on things. You can find screenshots on the forums of both GIMP and Inkscape running on Haiku. With that, waddlesplash has deemed the “GTK3 porting adventure” complete, and has returned to development work on Haiku’s core for this coming month. That’s a lot of progress, and two great applications to have running on Haiku.

Development and testing of Arca Noae’s support for UEFI continues. Here’s a brief recap of how this will work in ArcaOS 5.1: When the installation media boots, if the system is determined to be in “UEFI mode” as opposed to “Legacy mode” (“Legacy” here refers to the configuration which presents a traditional PC BIOS), ArcaOS will begin the preboot process using its compatibility system. Essentially, this is a 64-bit environment which will provide a rather complete BIOS emulation for the ArcaOS kernel, including VGA services for video display. I often wonder just how hard it must be for the ArcaOS developers to work within the confines of OS/2 and what must be stringent licensing agreements and NDAs with IBM. This kind of low-level programming on OS/2 can’t be easy.

Attribution is how advertisers know if their advertising campaigns are working. Attribution generates metrics that allow advertisers to understand how their advertising campaigns are performing. Related measurement techniques also help publishers understand how they are helping advertisers. Though attribution is crucial to advertising, current attribution practices have terrible privacy properties. For the last few months we have been working with a team from Meta (formerly Facebook) on a new proposal that aims to enable conversion measurement – or attribution – for advertising called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA. Mozilla working together with Facebook on a privacy feature. How desperate is Mozilla, exactly?

Today, we’re sharing a first look at the next release of Android, with the Android 13 Developer Preview 1. With Android 13 we’re continuing some important themes: privacy and security, as well as developer productivity. We’ll also build on some of the newer updates we made in 12L to help you take advantage of the 250+ million large screen Android devices currently running. There’s actually quite a few cool features in here, some of which are long overdue – like a standard, system-wide photo and video picker for sharing. Share sheets in Android have become an utter mess, so any cleanup is very welcome here.

Today the KDE Community releases Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates and bugfixes until the final Plasma 5 version, before we transition to Plasma 6. This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment. Highlights for this release include: a new overview effect for managing all your desktops and application windows (similar to the overview in GNOME), easy discovery of KRunner features with the help assistant, and unlocking screen and authentication using fingerprint reader. You will also notice a new Honeywave wallpaper, the ability to pick any color for UI accents, and critically important Plasma notifications now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages.

The Nintendo Game Processor was a custom built computer — complete with a keyboard & mouse — that was built with one specific purpose: to visually create your own Super Nintendo games, via drag and drop, and write those games onto an actual SNES game cartridge. Although the machine was never released, the planned architecture was really interesting: two parallel systems, one console-like which executed games natively and another where the development environment resided.

Starting in 1991, every copy of MS-DOS (and many versions of Windows) included a hidden artillery game called Gorillas. It inspired a generation of programmers and drew the ire of computer lab instructors everywhere. Here’s how it came to be—and how to play it today. I played the hell out of this as a kid. Such a simple but fun game, and the fact so many people had no idea it existed made it all the more exciting, like we had some secret knowledge especially grownups weren’t privy to.

GNU/Hurd is the original Free Software operating system started in the 1980s. Its microkernel design has been evolving over the years and the project has not quite hit mainstream use. I believe this is due to one main reason: the lack of drivers for peripherals and hardware. In this talk, I explain how NetBSD kernel drivers have been reused in a microkernel setting and demonstrate their use to boot up a GNU/Hurd system via a userspace rump disk driver, with a driverless Hurd kernel, gnumach. The ACPI management, PCI management, and actual driver are in separate processes with RPC interfaces between them, which separates out their debugging, licencing concerns and execution. Hurd is a neverending story, derailed by the massive popularity and uptake of the Linux kernel as the de facto standard kernel for the GNU project. I’d love for it to become more competitive, but the situation isn’t exactly looking great.

SoftBank Group Corp has shelved its blockbuster sale of Arm Ltd to U.S. chipmaker Nvidia Corp valued at up to $80 billion citing regulatory hurdles and will instead seek to list the company. Britain’s Arm, which named a new CEO on Tuesday, said it would go public before March 2023 and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son indicated that would be in the United States, most likely the Nasdaq. As everyone already expected.

“I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook,” Le Maire added. “Digital giants must understand that the European continent will resist and affirm its sovereignty.” The pair were responding to comments in Meta’s annual report published Thursday, warning that if it couldn’t rely on new or existing agreements to shift data, then it would “likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe.” Don’t threaten us with a good time, Zuck.

As many of you have no doubt noticed, a recent bug in our CMS flipped everyone over to our experimental dark mode (along with some other quirks). We haven’t had the time to address the issue at its core yet, but for the time being, if you’re a registered user, you should be able to get light mode back now by clicking the “Revert to Light Mode” link in your right sidebar. We’ll get light mode working for non-logged-in users ASAP. I sincerely appreciate that so many people emailed us to tell us how much you hate the dark mode. Really! Let us know in the comments if you notice anything else.

To most Americans, the name MarketScan means nothing. But most Americans mean everything to MarketScan. As a repository of sensitive patient information, the company’s databases churn silently behind the scenes of their medical care, scooping up their most guarded secrets: the diseases they have, the drugs they’re taking, the places their bodies are broken that they haven’t told anyone but their doctor. The family of databases that make up MarketScan now include the records of a stunning 270 million Americans, or 82% of the population. The vast reach of MarketScan, and its immense value, is unmistakable. Last month, a private equity firm announced that it would pay $1 billion to buy the databases from IBM. It was by far the most valuable asset left for IBM as the technology behemoth cast off its foundering Watson Health business. Imagine how easy it would be for companies to hire only people in tip-top health, and disregard anyone with even the smallest of preexisting conditions. This data is hugely valuable to just about anyone.

If you created an online account to manage your tax records with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), those login credentials will cease to work later this year. The agency says that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me, an online identity verification service that requires applicants to submit copies of bills and identity documents, as well as a live video feed of their faces via a mobile device. That will go down well.

Surprisingly, yes! It’s hard to judge how bad the performance really is, since it’s in a virtual machine, but all the software that I tested was definitely usable. It’s somewhat slow, but that’s exactly what you’d expect. As we used a lot of unsafe hacks (disabling dependency and file conflict checking, for instance) to get this to actually work, I wouldn’t recommend using this system for anything other than proving it’s possible. Now is this useful? The short answer is no. The long answer is also no. I can think of exactly zero uses of this experiment (and I must be pretty crazy for doing it). This is the kind of nonsense computing I can get behind.

While many Linux enthusiasts like to cite Linux’s stellar support for older hardware platforms, in reality that isn’t always the case. For instance with many old X.Org user-space mode-setting drivers for powering old graphics cards at least for display purposes, they can no longer even build with with modern toolchains/software components. Given the lack of bug reports around such issues, there are very likely few users trying some of these vintage hardware combinations. Longtime X.Org developer Alan Coopersmith of Oracle recently looked at going through all of the available X.Org drivers that aren’t in an archived state and seeing how they fare — with a goal of at least setting them up for simple continuous integration (CI) builds on GitLab. This is the inevitable result of hardware that was often already obscure and rare when it was new – let alone now, decades later. All we can hope for is a few people still carrying this hardware to donate either time or hardware to aid in keeping these drivers building and running.

But those laptops all have something in common with run-of-the-mill Windows PCs: a reliance on closed-source hardware and, often, the proprietary software and drivers needed to make it function. For some people, this is a tolerable trade-off. You put up with the closed hardware because it performs well, and it supports the standard software, development tools, and APIs that keep the computing world spinning. For others, it’s anathema—if you can’t see the source code for these “binary blobs,” they are inherently untrustworthy and should be used sparingly or not at all. The MNT Reform is a laptop for the latter group. It’s a crowdfunded, developed-in-the-open, extensively documented device that cares more about being open than it cares about literally any other aspect of the computing experience. Perhaps predictably, this makes for a laptop that is ideologically pure but functionally compromised. This ain’t it. I appreciate – as always – the effort, but this is not the way to go.

Along with the broader industry trend of transitioning security-sensitive code to memory-safe languages like Rust, there has been an effort to write a Rust-based replacement to GNU Coreutils. For nearly a year that Rust Coreutils has been able to run a basic Debian system while more recently they have been increasing their level of GNU Coreutils compatibility and in some cases now even outperforming the upstream project. For someone like me, who isn’t a programmer, it’s difficult to really say anything meaningful when it comes to the pros and cons of individual programming languages, but on the face of it, with my limited understanding, modern languages like Rust do seem like a safer, more modern, more robust choice.

This paper lays out the rationale for building a completely new operating system (OS) stack. Rather than build on a single node OS together with separate cluster schedulers, distributed filesystems, and network managers, we argue that a distributed transactional DBMS should be the basis for a scalable cluster OS. We show herein that such a database OS (DBOS) can do scheduling, file management, and inter-process communication with competitive performance to existing systems. In addition, significantly better analytics can be provided as well as a dramatic reduction in code complexity through implementing OS services as standard database queries, while implementing low-latency transactions and high availability only once. I’m not even going to pretend to understand any of this.

I think I’ve mentioned occasionally that various devices, mostly cellular modems, just use the Hayes or AT command set. Recently I obtained a GPS tracking device (made by Queclink) that is, interestingly, fully configured via the Hayes command set. It’s an example of a somewhat newer trend of converging the functionality of IoT devices into the modem baseband. But what is this Hayes command set anyway? The Hayes command set is a fascinating piece of technology that’s been hanging around for far longer than most likely even its creators thought it would.

Next month we’re bringing new experiences to Windows that include a public preview of how you can use Android apps on Windows 11 through the Microsoft Store and our partnerships with Amazon and Intel, taskbar improvements with call mute and unmute, easier window sharing and bringing weather to the taskbar, plus the introduction of two new redesigned apps, Notepad and Media Player. Definitely some welcome changes for Windows users.

In 2021, there were no Valhall devices running mainline Linux. While a lack of devices poses an obvious obstacle to device driver development, there is no better time to write drivers than before hardware reaches end-users. Developing and distributing production-quality drivers takes time, and we don’t want users to be reliant on closed source blobs. If development doesn’t start until a device hits shelves, that device could reach “end-of-life” by the time there are mature open drivers. But with a head start, we can have drivers ready by the time devices reach end users. Let’s see how. Amazing work.

Well, that didn’t take long. There is hope for users of Google’s “legacy” free G Suite accounts. Last week, Google announced a brutal policy change—it would shut down the Google Apps accounts of users who signed up during the first several years when the service was available for free. Users who had a free G Suite account were given two options: start paying the per-user monthly fee by July 2022 or lose your account. Naturally, this move led to a huge outcry outside (and apparently inside) Google, and now, the company seems to be backing down from most of the harsher terms of the initial announcement. First, Google is launching a survey of affected G Suite users—apparently, the company is surprised by how many people this change affected. Second, it’s promising a data-migration option (including your content purchases) to a consumer account before the shutdown hits. This migration option is all we’ve ever wanted, for years now. We’ve been asking Google over and over to give us this option, because those affected had seen the writing on the wall years ago. It highlights just how incompetent Google is at customer feedback that they were at all surprised by this in any way.

Nvidia Corp. is quietly preparing to abandon its purchase of Arm Ltd. from SoftBank Group Corp. after making little to no progress in winning approval for the $40 billion chip deal, according to people familiar with the matter. Nvidia has told partners that it doesn’t expect the transaction to close, according to one person, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. SoftBank, meanwhile, is stepping up preparations for an Arm initial public offering as an alternative to the Nvidia takeover, another person said. Look, Nvidia is obviously far from perfect, but the alternatives seem far, far worse. Would you want Arm to end up at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or one of the big Chinese players? I’m simply afraid an independent Arm will end up in far worse arms a few years down the line than Nvidia.

Steve Jobs’s NeXT computer company made a keyboard in 1988. With no prior electronics experience, I tried to get it to work over USB. To do so, I had to go way deeper than I ever expected – all the way back over 100 years to broadcast radio standards from the 1920s. I learned tons and tons, and had a lot of fun. The things people do for the perfect keyboard.

I’ve used NixOS as the only OS on my laptop for around three years at this point. Installing it has felt sort of like a curse: on the one hand, it’s so clearly the only operating system that actually gets how package management should be done. After using it, I can’t go back to anything else. One the other hand, it’s extremely complicated constantly changing software that requires configuration with the second-worst homegrown config programming language I’ve ever used. I don’t think that NixOS is the future, but I do absolutely think that the ideas in it are, so I want to write about what I think it gets right and what it gets wrong, in the hopes that other projects can take note. As such, this post will not assume knowledge of NixOS — if you’ve used NixOS significantly, there probably isn’t anything new in here for you. NixOS is talked about a lot – but it seems impenetrable for a newcomer or outsider to get into it.

In retrospect, it might be a bit tough to put a circle around what constituted a workstation. Is a PERQ a workstation? Probably. Xerox Alto and Star? Definitely. Symbolics Lisp machines? Not sure. Probably? The real success stories came out of Apollo, Sun, HP,IBM,NeXT,DEC and Silicon Graphics. For a time it was a hot market, especially in what was known then as technical computing: research, manufacturing, CAD, graphics, simulations. If you had a job where you were issued a Sun or an Apollo (back in the day) or an SGI, you were elevated. You were no longer some pleb coding in basic on a C64 or a tie wearing IBM clone user. You had entered a rarified sphere with limitless power at your fingertips. An Amiga was a grubby kids toy by comparison and the IBM PC was slow to move to graphical applications. The workstation manufacturers had fancy graphics, 32 bit processors and scarily huge margins. The designs of the boxes could be wild: The SGI Indy didn’t look like anything Bob from accounting had on his desk and you couldn’t buy anything like that at K-Mart. UNIX workstations from the ’90s and early 2000s are definitely my favourite genre of computers. My personal white whale is definitely the SGI Tezro, the last hurrah of SGI before they went all in on Intel, closely followed by Sun’s Ultra 45, its last SPARC workstation. These machines are only getting more expensive by the month now, and people are charging insane amounts of money for these, effectively, useless, dead-end machines. That’s why ordered all the parts for building my own dual-Xeon workstation.

I’ve spent the past several months trying on and off to make Linux run on the Presario. The 486SX is the oldest CPU Linux still supports! I was quite hindered by my lack of any floppy disks – fortunately, I managed to get my hands on a few working ones for Christmas this year and made some headway, first getting MS-DOS 6.22 installed on the new hard disk, then messing with the Linux kernel configuration until I got it to work. And yesterday I finally got it! Here are the steps for configuring a basic kernel with Linux 5.14.8. A lack of usefulness should not be a hindrance to having fun.

Ever wondered what Microsoft’s canceled version of Windows for the Surface Duo was going to be like? Well wonder no more, as we’ve got a first hands-on look at a pre-release build from mid-2018 running on a Lumia 950. We’ve already shown you what Andromeda OS looked like in recreated mockups, so now it’s time to see the real thing running on video. The idea of using a blank canvas for writing as the homescreen is fascinating, but it’s definitely not the first time this has been tried. In fact, one sure way to ensure your mobile platform will fail, is to build it around the notepad interface. It didn’t work for PenPoint OS, it didn’t work for Apple’s Newton, and it didn’t work for any other attempts either. People simply do not want to do handwriting on a computer. It’s been tried over and over, and people just don’t like it. The only platform which has been able to sort of make handwriting work is Palm OS, but that’s a misnomer since Palm’s Graffiti was a standardised character set you had to learn – it didn’t recognise handwriting at all.

RTM/Z80 is a multitasking kernel, built for Z80 based computers, written in Z80 assembly language, providing its users with an Application Programming Interface (API) accessible from programs written in the C language and the Z80 assembly language. It is intended to be a simple and easy to use learning tool, for those who want to understand the tips and tricks of the multitasking software systems. This is certainly not the only hobby operating system for Z80-based computers, but the more the merrier.