Never forgive them
The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech compani … ⌘ Read more

What does APPEND do in DOS?
The working principle of APPEND is not complicated. It primarily serves as a bridge between old DOS applications which have no or poor support for directories, and users who really, really want to organize files and programs in multiple directories and possibly across multiple drive letters. Of course the actual APPEND implementation is anything but straightforward. ↫ Michal Necasek Another gem of an article by Michal Necasek, detailing a command I’ve known about almost all my … ⌘ Read more

T2 Linux takes weird architectures seriously, including my beloved PA-RISC
With more and more Linux distributions – as well as the kernel itself – dropping support for more exotic, often dead architectures, it’s a blessing T2 Linux exists. This unique, source-based Linux distribution focuses on making it as easy as possible to build a Linux installation tailored to your needs, and supports an absolutely insane amount of architectures and platforms. In fact, … ⌘ Read more

Intel admits it no longer controls the direction of x86
Remember x86S, Intel’s initiative to create a 64bit-only x86 instruction set, with the goal of removing some of the bloat that the venerable architecture accumulated over the decades? Well, this initiative is now dead, and more or less replaced with the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group, a collection of companies with a stake in keeping x86 going. Most notably, this includes Intel and AMD, but also other tech giants like Goog … ⌘ Read more

NetBSD 10.1 released
NetBSD 10.1 has been released. As the version number indicates, this isn’t supposed to be a major, groundbreaking release, but it still contains a ton of changes, fixes, and improvements. It’s got the usual set of new and improved drivers, kernel improvements – like the ability to hotplug spares and components in a RAID – and improvements for various specific architectures, and much more. If you’re using NetBSD you already know how to upgrade, and if you’re not yet using NetBSD, here’s the … ⌘ Read more

The European Commission’s proposed interoperability measures place Apple under a form of guardianship
What’s the European Commission to do when one of the largest corporations in the world has not only been breaking its laws continually, but also absolutely refuses to comply, uses poison pills in its malicious compliance, badmouths you in the press through both official – and unofficial – employees? Well, you start telling that cor … ⌘ Read more

Thanks again to our outgoing sponsor: OS-SCi
We’re grateful for our weekly sponsor, OpenSource Science B.V., an educational institution focused on Open Source software. OS-SCi is training the next generation FOSS engineers, by using Open Source technologies and philosophy in a project learning environment. One final reminder: OS-SCi is offering OSNews readers a free / gratis online masterclass by Prof. Ir. Erik Mols on how the proprietary ecosystem is killing itself. This is a live event, on January 9, 20 … ⌘ Read more

POSIX conformance testing for the Redox signals project
The Redox team has received a grant from NLnet to develop Redox OS Unix-style Signals, moving the bulk of signal management to userspace, and making signals more consistent with the POSIX concepts of signaling for processes and threads. It also includes Process Lifecycle and Process Management aspects. As a part of that project, we are developing tests to verify that the new functionality is in reasonable compliance with … ⌘ Read more

How to make an Apple Watch work with Android
What if you have an Android phone, but consider the Apple Watch superior to other smartwatches? Well, you could switch to iOS, or, you know, you could hack your way into making an Apple Watch work with Android, like Abishek Muthian did. So I decided to make Apple Watch work with my Android phone using open-source applications, interoperable protocols and 3rd party services. If you just want to use my code and techniques and not read my commen … ⌘ Read more

A quick look at OS/2’s built-in virtualisation
Most of us are aware that IBM’s OS/2 has excellent compatibility with DOS and Windows 3.x programs, to the point where OS/2 just ships with an entire installation of Windows 3.x built-in that you can run multiple instances of. In fact, to this day, ArcaOS, the current incarnation of the maintained and slightly modernised OS/2 codebase, still comes with an entire copy of Windows 3.x, making ArcaOS one of the very best ways to run DOS and Windows 3.x programs on a modern mac … ⌘ Read more

Fedora proposes dropping Atomic desktops for PPC64LE
Fedora is proposing to stop building their Atomic desktop versions for PPC64LE. PopwerPC 64 LE basically comes down to IBM’s POWER architecture, and as far as desktop use goes, that exclusively means the POWER9 machines from Raptor Computing Systems. I reviewed their small single-socket Blackbird machine in 2021, and I also have their dual-socket Talos II workstation. I can tell you from experience that nobody who owns one of … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Recall screenshots credit cards and Social Security numbers, even with the “sensitive information” filter enabled
Microsoft’s Recall feature recently made its way back to Windows Insiders after having been pulled from test builds back in June, due to security and privacy concerns. The new version of Recall encrypts the screens it captures and, by default, it has a “Filter sensitive information,” settin … ⌘ Read more

Fedora’s new Btrfs SIG should focus on making Btrfs’ features more accessible
As Michel Lind mentioned back in August, we wanted to form a Special Interest Group to further the development and adoption of Btrfs in Fedora. As of yesterday, the SIG is now formed. ↫ Neal Gompa Since I’ve been using Fedora on all my machines for a while now, I’ve also been using Btrfs as my one and only file system for just as much time, without ever experiencing any issues. I … ⌘ Read more

There’s a market out there for a modern X11/Motif-based desktop distribution
EMWM is a fork of the Motif Window Manager with fixes and enhancements. The idea behind this is to provide compatibility with current xorg extensions and applications, without changing the way the window manager looks and behaves. This includes support for multi-monitor setups through Xinerama/Xrandr, UFT-8 support with Xft fonts, and overall better compatibility with software tha … ⌘ Read more

Xfce 4.20 with experimental Wayland support released
After two years of intense development, the third major Linux desktop environment has released a new version: Xfce 4.20 is here. The major focus of this release cycle was getting Xfce ready for Wayland, and they’ve achieved quite a bit of that goal, but support for it is still experimental. Thanks to Brian and Gaël almost all Xfce components are able to run on Wayland windowing, while still keeping support for X11 windowing. T … ⌘ Read more

“Firefox” ported to Haiku
Haiku is already awash with browsers to choose from, with Falkon (yes, the same one) being the primary choice for most Haiku users, since it offers the best overall experience. We’ve got a new addition to the team, however, as Firefox – in the form of Iceweasel, because trademark stuff and so on – has been ported to Haiku. Jules Enriquez provides some more background in a post on Mastodon: An experimental port of Firefox Iceweasel is now available on HaikuDepot! So far, most sites … ⌘ Read more

Google unveils Android XR for headsets and glasses
It was only a matter of time before Google would jump into the virtual/augmented reality fray once again with Android, after their several previous attempts failed to catch on. This time, it’s called Android XR, and it’s aimed at both the big clunky headsets like Apple’s Vision Pro as well as basic glasses that overlay information onto the world. Google has been working on this with Samsung, apparently, and of course, this new And … ⌘ Read more

Support my attempt to find out if you can do NFC tap-to-pay without big tech
I’ve been dropping a lot of hints about my journey to rid myself of Google’s Android on my Pixel 8 Pro lately, a quest which grew in scope until it covered everything from moving to GrapheneOS to dropping Gmail, from moving to open source “stock” Android application replacements to reconsidering my use of Google Photos, from dropping my dependency on Google Keep to setting up Ho … ⌘ Read more

QEMU with VirtIO GPU Vulkan support
With its latest reales qemu added the Venus patches so that virtio-gpu now support venus encapsulation for vulkan. This is one more piece to the puzzle towards full Vulkan support. An outdated blog post on clollabora described in 2021 how to enable 3D acceleration of Vulkan applications in QEMU through the Venus experimental Vulkan driver for VirtIO-GPU with a local development environment. Following up on the outdated write up, this is how its done today. ↫ P … ⌘ Read more

Turning off Zen 4’s op cache for curiosity and giggles
CPUs start executing instructions by fetching those instruction bytes from memory and decoding them into internal operations (micro-ops). Getting data from memory and operating on it consumes power and incurs latency. Micro-op caching is a popular technique to improve on both fronts, and involves caching micro-ops that correspond to frequently executed instructions. AMD’s recent CPUs have particularly large micro-op caches, … ⌘ Read more

A twenty-five year old curl bug
When we announced the security flaw CVE-2024-11053 on December 11, 2024 together with the release of curl 8.11.1 we fixed a security bug that was introduced in a curl release 9039 days ago. That is close to twenty-five years. The previous record holder was CVE-2022-35252 at 8729 days. ↫ Daniel Stenberg Ir’s really quite fascinating to see details like this about such a widepsread and widely used tool like curl. The bug in question was a logic error, which made Stenber … ⌘ Read more

HP-RT: HP’s real-time operating system from the ’90s
Every now and then I load OpenPA and browse around. Its creator and maintainer, Paul Weissmann, has been very active lately updating the site with new articles, even more information, and tons of other things, and it’s usually a joy to stumble upon something I haven’t read yet, or just didn’t know anything about. This time it’s something called HP-RT, a real-time operating system developed and sold by HP for a number of its PA-RI … ⌘ Read more

Maker of emotional supports robots for kids abruptly shuts down, kills all the robots in the process
Some news is both sad and dystopian at the same time, and this is one of those cases. Moxie, a start-up selling $800 emotional support robots intended to help children is shutting down operations since it can’t find enough money, and since their robots require constant connectivity to servers to operate, all of the children’s robots … ⌘ Read more

A brief history of Mac servers
Although there’s little evidence of them today, Apple made a long succession of Mac servers and servers for Macs from 1988 to 2014, and only discontinued support for the last release of macOS Server in April 2022. Its first entry into the market was a special version of the Macintosh II running Apple’s own port of Unix way back in 1988. ↫ Howard Oakley These days, you can nab Xserves for pretty cheap on eBay, but since Apple doesn’t properly support them anymore, they’r … ⌘ Read more

Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip
Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements. The concensus seems to be that this is a major achievement and milestone in quantum computing, and that it’s come faster than everyone expected. This topic is obviously far more complicated than most people can handle, so we have to rely on the verdicts and opinions from indep … ⌘ Read more

OS-SCi: This Week’s Sponsor
We’re grateful for our weekly sponsor, OpenSource Science B.V., an educational institution focused on Open Source software. OS-SCi is training the next generation FOSS engineers, by using Open Source technologies and philosophy in a project learning environment. OS-SCi is offering OSNews readers a free / gratis online masterclass by Prof. Ir. Erik Mols on how the proprietary ecosystem is killing itself. This is a live event, on January 9, 2025 at 17:00 PM CET. Sign up here: htt … ⌘ Read more

Thank you to our weekly sponsor, OS-SCi
We’re grateful for our weekly sponsor, OpenSource Science B.V., an educational institution focused on Open Source software. OS-SCi is training the next generation FOSS engineers, by using Open Source technologies and philosophy in a project learning environment. OS-SCi is offering OSNews readers a free / gratis online masterclass by Prof. Ir. Erik Mols on how the proprietary ecosystem is killing itself. This is a live event, on January 9, 2025 at 17:00 … ⌘ Read more

The state of Falkon: KDE’s browser is much better than you know
It’s no secret that I am very worried about the future of Firefox, and the future of Firefox on Linux in particular. I’m not going to rehash these worries here, but suffice to say that with Mozilla increasingly focusing on advertising, Firefox’ negligible market share, and the increasing likeliness that the Google Search deal, which accounts for 85% of Mozilla’s revenue, will come to an end, I have little f … ⌘ Read more

Unofficial Windows 11 mobile is possible even on select budget phones with a free utility
Back in December 2019, Microsoft finally killed off Windows 10 Phone as it announced the end of support. The company’s grand plans with Lumia and Windows Phones sadly never became the success it needed to be in order to be able to compete with the likes of Android or iOS. Thus Windows 11 Phone never became a real official thing outside of concepts. Howev … ⌘ Read more