AlpineBSD is an operating system based on the NetBSD kernel with a userspace inspired by Alpine Linux and the objective of making it possible to use as little AI-generated software as possible. There is no LLM output included in the base system or main package repository (AlpineBSD AI policy).

↫ AlpineBSD’s website

AlpineBSD uses the NetBSD kernel, libc, and essential tools, and combines them with Alpine’s apk-tools package manager, busybox, and generlaly preferring GNU tools over their BSD equivalents. It uses the s6 init system, but the project intends to add OpenRC as an alternative. The project is in its very early stages, so don’t expect things like an installer; you’re on your own, basically.

The Nintendo Wii (and its related consoles) were already made to run the PowerPC version of Windows NT as well as Mac OS X, but now we can add another milestone to the list: classic Mac OS.

So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired the company, and the Wii’s Vegas (and its later revision Bollywood) and Wii U’s Latte are effectively straight successors) reached the desktop for the first time, most likely the first time since the CHRP clone era that someone outside of Apple brought up classic Mac OS on a new system to the desktop. Despite still being nowhere near ready for a public release, I want to talk about the challenges I faced with this project so far.

↫ Rairii at Virtuallyfun

Various versions of Mac OS boot to the desktop, including Mac OS 9.2.2, the last ever version, but there’s still a ton or work to be done before this is ready for release. Still, with Rairii amazing track record of porting all kinds of things to various PowerPC machines, including getting the PowerPC version of Windows NT to run on various PowerPC Macs, I have little doubt they’ll manager to get this to a releasable state.

I absolutely love this kind of work.

Flag LinuxNetBSD made a seemingly small, but very welcome announcement today: they’re adding a more user-friendly, easier to use command-line text editor to the base install.

To ease the transition for new users, NetBSD -current now includes an alternative editor to vi(1) and xedit(1) in its base system, atto(1).

It is a modeless screen-based editor similar to nano, pico, xedit, or emacs. It is only 48 kilobytes, making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system.

↫ NetBSD Foundation on Fedi

Most guides and how-to article for operating systems like NetBSD assume the use of vi, and while I don’t want to ignite a flamewar, vi isn’t exactly the most approachable or friendly piece of software out there. My occassional text editing in the command line is all done through nano, but now I’m definitely curious to give atto a go.

While other tech news websites are plastered with articles about a PC maker adding a touch screen to one of their laptops, we’re talking about a new CLI text editor in NetBSD’s base system. Priorities, folks.

Windows 11 25H2, starting with build 26200.9550, now comes with something called CLAT.

As organizations move toward IPv6-only and IPv6-mostly networks, some applications still depend on IPv4-only applications or services. Windows CLAT helps those applications continue to work when a network does not provide native IPv4 connectivity.

CLAT is the client-side component of 464XLAT. It statelessly translates IPv4 traffic from the Windows client into IPv6 for transport across the network to a provider-side translator (PLAT), which provides stateful NAT64 translation to IPv4.

↫ Jim Alumbaugh at Microsoft’s Networking Blog

Yet another important component of the long, neverending transition to IPv6. Like endlessly cutting a cucumber in half, you’ll never quite run out of cucumber to cut.

What’s the oldest Windows GUI application you can still run on Windows 11 today, without any modifications? For now, the best answer Boris Popik can come up with is an innocuous application from build 347 of Windows NT 3.1, an early prerelease: CDPLAYER.EXE. You can’t go any older than that, because earlier prerelease builds had not yet finalised its PE format and calling convention. Neat find.

Popik also mentions a few other contenders, but I won’t spoil those here.

Another month has crumbled to dust under the oppressive boots of time, so it’s time for another month of Redox improvements. This past month, Redox’ build system gained support for Clang, SDL2 saw performance improvements, and WebKitGTK3’s HTML layout rendering was fixed. Users of Intel Tiger Lake processors can now enjoy external display hot-plugging, and overall system performance has been improved in a variety of ways. And as always, there’s the long lists of kernel, relibc, and driver improvements and fixes as well.

Redox keeps making big strides every month, and it’s definitely one of the few alternative operating systems that actually feels like it might, one day, be an actual contender for general purpose use.

We’ve been following along with Carmen Kaiser’s Apple Network Server exploits, and by now things are really starting to come together for owners of this machine. When we last left off, the ROM to allow Mac OS to run on the machine which normally runs IBM’s AIX, but there were still a number of bugs, limitations, and issues to be worked out. A lot of progress on that front has been made.

The good news is, many of the issues with the preproduction ROM in Mac OS can be fixed or worked around in software. So I’ve fixed or worked around many of them in software: the MACE Ethernet is fixed, the on-board video is now supported, and the ANS can restart properly back into Mac OS. Plus, because it’s the preproduction ROM, you can still boot AIX, thus preserving the entire historical reason for Shiner’s existence. Here’s the first cut of that software and how it was developed.

↫ Cameron Kaiser

There’s still two issues Kaiser wishes to address – the internal SCSI bays don’t work, and the ROM doesn’t properly register parity RAM – but the progress here is amazing.

Thomas Adam, one of the core developers of FVWM, has been working on CoW for a while now. CoW can best be described as “FVWM for Wayland”, which uniquely uses the River compositor. River, in turn, is unique in that it does not combine the compositor and window manager into a single program, allowing for a more traditional X11-like approach.

Adam released version 0.4 today, which comes with a load of fixes, changes, and minor improvements, as well as one bigger-ticket item: container windows.

This PR introduces the concept of a top-level container window.

This means a window can be subdivided into columns and rows (called panes) and can be resized independently of one another.

The idea for this has been unashamedly stolen from shod.

↫ Thomas Adam

I’ve been keeping an eye on CoW ever since I learned about it when it was first released, and at some point soon I want to build a desktop around it for myself.

When thinking about impressive technical achievements in retro games, most people will first point to graphical milestones set by action games like Doom or Quake. Rightfully so, but at least I am personally far more impressed by the early examples of the city builder genre. Simulating whole economies on a large scale with a fraction of today’s power seems impossible if modern builder games even struggle on modern machines.

Of course this didn’t stop developers in the past to develop and run city builder games on significantly weaker hardware. The original SimCity for example lists Intel’s 386SX as the CPU in it’s system requirements. A CPU which at the time of it’s launch ran at magnificent 16 MHz.

↫ Lars Thießen

What’s even more impressive are some of the other systems the origin al SimCity was ported to, which had even more limited hardware than a 386SX. The Super Nintendo got a SimCity port, which even included fun extras like a Mario statue and Bowser taking up the mantle of the Godzilla disaster, and additional systems the PC version didn’t have. Hell, they even worked on a port to the NES, but it was cancelled and thought lost, until a relatively complete and working copy was discovered in 2017. Even this NES version contained features not available in the PC version.

Hardware limitations really did breed a lot of innovation back in those days, and sometimes I wonder if programmers and developers could benefit from tasking themselves with working within such limitations today, if only to become a bit more prudent with resources.

Earlier this year, I needed to learn PowerShell scripting for one Windows-related project, and I have tried it out a few more times on Mac. It has quickly become one of my favorite tools for automation and scripting—taking on jobs that I would have otherwise tried to do with Node.js, Shortcuts, macOS Automator, or heaven forbid, Bash scripts.

I get it now. PowerShell is great, even if you don’t use it as your shell, and even if you’re on Mac or Linux.

↫ Corbin Davenport

I don’t use the shell often enough on any of my main machines to have much of an idea about the strenghths and weaknesses of PowerShell compared to more traditional shells, but this is definitely not the first time I’ve heard a lot of praise for it from people otherwise knee-deep in the UNIX and traditional shell world.

There really must be something to this, and since PowerShell is also available on Linux and macOS, it’s pretty straightforward to give it a go without having to deal with Windows.

If you’ve ever written C (or c++) on a mac, you’ll know that the so-called gcc is just clang in disguise. Most people (fairly) assume that this is just an alias, but this is not true! It’s a binary! Now, what is this binary? I naively assumed that it would just be shelling out to clang but it turns out the answer is more interesting than that.

↫ juliethefoxcoon

It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Unlike traditional OSs that separate user applications from the kernel, a unikernel bundles everything into a single, isolated image that runs directly on a hypervisor (like KVM, BHyve, or OpenVMM). Because it removes unnecessary drivers and background services, a unikernel is extremely small, fast to boot, and efficient with resources.

Here, we will learn how to develop and deploy unikernels built using the OCaml language and the Solo5 unikernel. These are the two fundamental components that will then enable us to develop our own applications in the form of unikernels, which we can subsequently deploy using Albatross.

↫ Unikernels in OCaml

Some light reading for the weekend.

Early 2025, I wrote about how I think macOS’ UNIX certification was basically a lie. It required so many convoluted and cumbersome changes to macOS that literally nobody applies to their system that it the certification had kind of become a farce. At the end of the article I wondered for how much longer Apple would be playing this little charade to hammer macOS through a meaningless UNIX-shaped hole, and it turns out the answer was “about 18 months”.

When you go to the Open Group’s website and the list of certified UNIX operating systems, macOS is no longer listed. For the past few weeks, it was still listed if you drilled down specifically to the UNIX 03 certification, but that, too, has now been removed. Assuming macOS 27 doesn’t return in the near future with a brand new certification, we can safely say that Apple got tired of paying a few employees to get its desktop operating system certified.

With one more operating system gone from the list, there’s now only one UNIX operating systems left: AIX. While the registry also lists HP-UX, z/OS, and UnixWare/OpenServer, those either only conform to really old UNIX certifications (from the ’90s), or simply aren’t developed anymore (HP sunset HP-UX at the end of last year). Only one operating system version conforms to the latest version of the certification, UNIX 07, and that’s AIX 7.2 TL5 “and later”, which possibly includes AIX 7.3, the most recent version of AIX.

Not that any of this really matters.

Hot on the heels of Wine being ported to OpenBSD, we now have the release of OpenBSD 8.0. It adds hibernate support for arm64, switches the sparc64 toolchain to LLVM, and updates the DRM graphics drivers to Linux 6.18.53, which also adds support for Intel Arc A-Series (DG2/Alchemist) graphics cards. There’s a whole bunch of improvements, fixes, and changes for RISC-V and ARM in general, of course, as well as to the various Wi-Fi drivers. On top of that, it also comes with new versions of OpenSSH and LibreSSL, as well as a massive list of other improvements and fixes.

If you’ve never installed OpenBSD before, be sure to read this detailed guide to know what to do once everything’s installed, while listening to the official release song, of course.