Another excellent guide from friend of the website Stefano Marinelli. A client of mine has several Windows Server VMs, which I had not migrated to FreeBSD/bhyve until a few weeks ago. These VMs were originally installed with the traditional BIOS boot mode, not UEFI, on Proxmox. Fortunately, their virtual disks are on ZFS, which allowed me to test and achieve the final result in just a few steps. This is because Windows VMs (server or otherwise) often installed on KVM (Proxmox, etc.), especially older ones, are non-UEFI, using the traditional BIOS boot mode. bhyve doesn’t support this setup, but Windows allows changing the boot mode, and I could perform the migration directly on the target FreeBSD server. ↫ Stefano Marinelli I link to guides like these because finding such detailed guides born out of experience, written by actual humans with actual experience – instead of bots on content farms – is remarkably hard. There’s more than enough similar content like this out there covering Windows or popular Linux distributions like Red Hat, but the BSDs tend to fall a bit short here. As such, promoting people writing such content is something I’ll happily do. Marinelli also happens to host the Matrix server (as part of his BSD Cafe effort) that houses the OSNews Matrix room, accessible by becoming an OSNews Patreon.
Version 6.12 of the Linux kernel has been released. The main feature consists of the merger of the real-time PREEMPT_RT scheduler, most likely one of the longest-running merger sagas in Linux’ history. This means that Linux now fully supports both soft and hard real-time capabilities natively, which is a major step forward for the platform, especially when looking at embedded development. It’s now no longer needed to draw in real-time support from outside the kernel. Linux 6.12 also brings a huge number of improvements for graphics drivers, for both Intel and AMD’s graphics cards. With 6.12, Linux now supports the Intel Xe2 integrated GPU as well as Intel’s upcoming discrete “Battlemage” GPUs by default, and it contains more AMD RDNA4 support for those upcoming GPUs. DRM panics messages in 6.12 will show a QR code you can scan for more information, a feature written in Rust, and initial support for the Raspberry Pi 5 finally hit mainline too. Of course, there’s a lot more in here, like the usual LoongArch and ARM improvements, new drivers, and so on. and if you’re a regular Linux user you’ll see 6.12 make it to your distribution within a few weeks or months.
A few weeks ago I linked to a story by Misty De Meo, in which they explored what happened to the various eccentric Japanese PC platforms. One of the platforms mentioned was FM Towns, made by Fujitsu, which came with its own graphical operating system from the era of Windows 3.x. I had never heard of this one before, but it looks incredibly interesting, with some unique UI ideas I’d love to explore, if only I could read Japanese. Since learning Japanese is a serious life-long commitment, I can safely say that’s not going to happen. It seems I’m not the only one interested in FM Towns, as a new project called Free Towns OS (or Tsugaru OS in Japanese) aims to provide an open source replacement for the Free Towns operating system. The goal of this project is to write a copyright-free FM Towns OS to run free games and the re-released games, or why not a brand-new game for FM Towns. without concerns of violating copyrights of the files included in the original Towns OS. Let’s see how far we can go! But, so far so good. Now Tsugaru OS is capable of running the three probably the most popular free games, Panic Ball 2, VSGP, and Sky Duel. All playable without single file from the original Towns OS. ↫ Free Towns OS GitHub page That’s a pretty good milestone already. The project aims to eventually also be able to run on real hardware instead of just emulators, but further than that, it’s difficult for me to extract more information from the descriptions since not every paragraph has been translated to English just yet. Finding English information on FM Towns OS in general is hard, so I’m also not entirely sure just how much the project has already been able to recreate. I definitely hope this effort attracts more interest, hopefully also from outside of Japan so we can get a translated version people outside of Japan can use.
This option is for users that want to create a Windows 11 on Arm virtual machine on supported hardware using an ISO file or to install Windows 11 on Arm directly without a DVD or USB flash drive. The ISO file can also be used to manually create bootable installation media (USB flash drive) to install Windows 11 on Arm, but it may be necessary to include drivers from the device manufacturer for the installation media to be successfully bootable. This download is a multi-edition ISO which uses your product key to unlock the correct edition. ↫ Windows on ARM ISO download Oddly enough, up until now, Microsoft hadn’t published a Windows 11 on ARM ISO yet. With this new ISO, ARM users can do a fresh install, and create Windows on ARM virtual machines. Not the biggest news in the world, but it’s a little bit surprising it’s taken them this long to publish this ISO file.
Valve has been holding on to a special surprise for Half-Life 2 fans to celebrate the game crossing its 20th birthday. Today, the company shipped the 20th Anniversary Update for the iconic Gordon Freeman adventure from 2004, combining the base experience and all episodes into one, bringing developer commentary, Steam Workshop support, and much more. Adding to all that, the game is completely free to claim on Steam right now too. ↫ Pulasthi Ariyasinghe at NeoWin Valve even made a nice web page with fun animated characters for it (they’re just video loops). Definitely a nice surprise for those of us who’ve already played the game a million times, and for those of us who haven’t yet for some reason and can now claim the game for free. This update also fixes some more bugs, adds a ton of new graphics settings, allows you to choose between different styles for certain visual effects, aim assist for controller users has been massively updated, and so much more. For a 20 year old game, such a free update is not something that happens very often, so good on Valve for doing this. I can barely believe it’s been 20 years, and that we still have no conclusion or even continuation to the story that so abruptly ended with Episode Two. I honestly doubt we’ll ever going to see a Half-Life 3 or even an Episode Three, simply because at this point the expectations would be so bonkers high there’s no way Valve could meet them. On top of that, why waste time, money, and possibly reputation and goodwill on Half-Life 3, when you can just sit on the couch and watch the Steam gravy train roll into the station? Because that’s a hell of a lot of gravy.
Remember Darwin? It’s the core of Apple’s macOS, and the company has always – sometimes intermittently – released its source code as open source. Not much ever really happens with Darwin, and any attempts at building a usable operating system on top of Darwin have failed. There was OpenDarwin, which at one point could run a GNOME desktop, but in 2006 it shut itself down, stating: Over the past few years, OpenDarwin has become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects. The original notions of developing the Mac OS X and Darwin sources has not panned out. Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this. Administering a system to host other people’s projects is not what the remaining OpenDarwin contributors had signed up for and have been doing this thankless task far longer than they expected. It is time for OpenDarwin to go dark. ↫ OpenDarwin announcement from 2006 (archived) Any other attempts at making Darwin work as a standalone operating system were further frustrated by the fact that Apple stopped releasing bootable Darwin images, so Darwin never amounted to much more than Apple throwing some code over the fence every now and then for some cheap goodwill among the few people who still believe Apple cares about open source. However, the dream is still alive – the idea that you could use Darwin to build a general purpose operating system, perhaps one with some semblance of compatibility with macOS software, is an attractive one. Enter PureDarwin. This project has been around for a while now, releasing an X11-capable build of Darwin somewhere in 2015, followed long, long after that by a CLI-only build in 2020. A few days ago, the project announced an ambitious change in direction, with a plan and roadmap for turning PureDarwin into a general purpose operating system. The PureDarwin project, originally created to bring Apple’s open-source Darwin OS to more people, is heading in a fresh new direction with some clear short-term and long-term goals. These new plans are all about breathing new life into PureDarwin. In the short term, we’re focused on getting some solid basics in place with graphical interfaces using MATE Desktop and LightDM, so users can get a functional and accessible experience sooner rather than later. Looking further down the line, the long-term goals—shown in some early wireframes—are about creating a fully featured, polished desktop experience that’s easy to use and visually appealing. Plus, a new versioning system will make it clear how PureDarwin is progressing independently from Apple’s Darwin updates, making it easier for everyone to keep track. This refreshed direction sets PureDarwin up to grow from its roots into a user-centered operating system. ↫ PureDarwin announcement These plans and roadmap sound quite well thought-out to me. I especially like that they first focus on getting a solid MATE desktop running before shifting to building a more custom desktop environment, as this makes it much easier – relatively speaking – to get people up and running with Darwin. Once Darwin with MATE is halfway usable, it can serve its job as a development platform for the more custom desktop environment they have planned. It won’t surprise you, by the way, that the sketches for the custom desktop environment are very Apple-y. As part of the goals of creating a usable MATE desktop and then a more custom desktop environment, a whole bunch of low-level things need to be handled. All the kexts (drivers) required for Darwin to boot need to be built, and CoreFoundation needs to be updated, a process that was already under way. On top of that, the project wants to focus on getting Wayland to work, make Darwin buildable under BSD/Linux, and develop an installer. Beyond those goals, the project has an even bigger, tentative ambition: API compatibility with macOS. They make it very clear they’re not at all focused on this right now, and consider it more of a pie-in-the-sky goal for the the distant future. It’s an interesting ambition we’ve seen tried various times before, and it surely won’t be even remotely easy to get it to a level where it could do much more than run some command-line utilities. Darling, a similar project to run macOS binaries on Linux in the style of Wine, has only recently been able to run some small, very basic GUI applications. I like all of these goals, and especially getting it to a state where you can download a Darwin ISO running MATE should be entirely realistic to achieve in a short timeframe. A custom desktop environment is a lot more work of course, all depending on how much they intend to reuse from the Linux graphics and desktop stack. Anything beyond that, and it becomes much murkier, obviously. As always, it’s all going to come down to just how many active and enthusiastic contributors they can attract, and more importantly retain once the initial excitement of this announcement wears off.
Update: that was quick! GitHub banned the “AI” company’s account. Only GitHub gets to spam AI on GitHub, thank you very much. Most of the time, products with “AI” features just elicit sighs, especially when the product category in question really doesn’t need to have anything to do with “AI” in any way, shape, or form. More often than not, though, such features are not only optional and easily ignorable, and we can always simply choose not to buy or use said products in the first place. I mean, over the last few days I’ve migrated my Pixel 8 Pro from stock Google Android to GrapheneOS as the final part of my platform transition away from big tech, and Google’s insistence on shoving “AI” into everything certainly helped in spurring this along. But what are you supposed to do if an “AI” product forces itself upon you? What if you can’t run away from it? What if, one day, you open your GitHub repository and see a bunch of useless PRs from an “AI” bot who claims to help you fix issues, without you asking it to do so? Well, that’s what’s happening to a bunch of GitHub users who were unpleasantly surprised to see garbage, useless merge requests from a random startup testing out some “AI” tool that attempts to automatically ‘fix’ open issues on GitHub. The proposed ‘fixes’ are accompanied by a disclaimer: Disclaimer: The commit was created by Latta AI and you should never copy paste this code before you check the correctness of generated code. Solution might not be complete, you should use this code as an inspiration only. This issue was tried to solve for free by Latta AI – https://latta.ai/ourmission If you no longer want Latta AI to attempt solving issues on your repository, you can block this account. ↫ Example of a public open issue with the “AI” spam Let me remind you: this tool, called “Latta AI”, is doing all of this unprompted, without consent, and the commits generally seem bogus and useless, too, in that they don’t actually fix any of the issues. To make matters worse, your GitHub repository will then automatically appear as part of its marketing – again without any consent or permission from the owners of the GitHub projects in question. Clicking through to the GitHub repositories listed on the front page will reveal a lot about how developers are responding: they’re not amused. Every link I clicked on had Latta AI’s commit and comment marked as spam, abuse, or just outright deleted. We’re talking public open issues here, so it’s not like developers aren’t looking for input and possible fixes from third parties – they just want that input and those possible fixes to come from real humans, not some jank code generator that’s making us destroy the planet even faster. This is what the future of “AI” really looks like. It’s going to make spam even easier to make, even more pervasive, and even cheaper, and it’s going to infest everything. Nothing will be safe from these monkeys on typewriters, and considering what the spread of misinformation by human-powered troll farms can do, I don’t think we’re remotely ready for what “AI” is going to mean for our society. I can assure you lying about brown people eating cats and dogs will be remembered as quaint before this nonsense is over.
One of the things I’ve consistently heard from just about anyone involved in Android development are laments about the sorry state of the Android Emulator included in Google’s Android Studio. It seems that particularly its performance is not great, with people often resorting to third-party options or real devices. Well, it seems the Android development team at Google has taken this to heart, and has spent six months focusing almost solely on fixing up the Android Emulator. We know how critical the stability, reliability, and performance of the Android Emulator is to your everyday work as an Android developer. After listening to valuable feedback about stability, reliability, and performance, the Android Studio team took a step back from large feature work on the Android Emulator for six months and started an initiative called Project Quartz. This initiative was made up of several workstreams aimed at reducing crashes, speeding up startup time, closing out bugs, and setting up better ways to detect and prevent issues in the future. ↫ Neville Sicard-Gregory at the Android Developers Blog Steps taken include moving to a newer version of Qt for the user interface of the emulator, improving the graphics rendering system used in the Android Emulator, and adding a whole bunch of tests to their existing test suite. The end result is that the number of crashes in the Android Emulator dropped by 30%, which, if bourne out out in the real world, will have a material impact for Android developers. During the Project Quartz effort, Google also cut the number of open issues by 44%, but they do note only 17% of those were fixed during Project Quartz, with the remainder being obsoleted or previously fixed issues. If you download or update to the latest version of Android Studio, you’ll get the new and improved Android Emulator as well.
Today, we are excited to announce the launch of .NET 9, the most productive, modern, secure, intelligent, and performant release of .NET yet. It’s the result of another year of effort on the part of thousands of developers from around the world. This new release includes thousands of performance, security, and functional improvements. You will find sweeping enhancements across the entire .NET stack from the programming languages, developer tools, and workloads enabling you to build with a unified platform and easily infuse your apps with AI. ↫ .NET Team at the .Net Blog All I know is that these are very important words, and a very important release, for thousands and thousands of unknown developers slaving away in obscurity, creating, maintaining, and fixing endless amounts of corporate software very few of us ever actually get to see very often. They toil away for meager pay in the 21st century version of the coal mines of the 19th century, without any recognition, appreciation, or applause. They work long hours, make their way through the urban planning hell that is modern America, and come home to make some gruel and drink water from lead pipes, waiting for the sweet relief of what little sleep they manage to get, only to do it all over again the next day. …I may have a bit of a skewed perception of reality for most IT people. In all seriousness, .NET is a hugely popular set of tools and frameworks, and while it’s probably not the most sexy topic in the tech world, any new release matters to a ton of people. .NET 9.0. This new version’s main focus seems to be performance, with over 1000 performance-related changes tot he various components that make up .NET. In a blog post about these performance improvements, Stephen Toub explains in great detail what some of the improvements are, and where the benefits lie. Of course, there’s an insane amount of talk about “AI” features in .NET 9, and apparently .NET MAUI is seeing a surge in popularity on Android, if you believe Microsoft (“30$” increase in “developer usage” means little when you don’t provide a baseline). .NET MAUI is Microsoft’s cross-platform framework for building applications for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. Among other things, .NET MAUI 9 provides more access to platform-native features, as well as benefiting from some of the performance improvements. There’s also a paragraph about .NET 9 development on Windows, just in case you thought the .NET team forgot Windows existed. With .NET 9, your Windows apps will have access to the latest OS features and capabilities while ensuring they are more performant and accessible than ever before. Whether you are starting a new modern app with WinUI 3 and the Windows App SDK or modernizing your existing WPF and WinForms applications, your Windows apps run best on .NET 9. We have been collaborating closely with the Windows developer community to bring features that you have been requesting. This includes Native AOT support for WinUI 3 for smaller and more performant apps, modern theming enhancements with Fluent UI for WPF, and WinForms gets a boost with a new Dark Mode, modern icon APIs, and improved asynchronous API access with Control.InvokeAsync. ↫ .NET Team at the .Net Blog There’s way more on top of all of this, from changes to the languages .NET uses to new releases of the various developer tools, like Visual Studio.
quBSD is a FreeBSD jails/bhyve wrapper which implements a Qubes inspired containerization schema. Written in shell, based on zfs, and uses the underlying FreeBSD tools. ↫ quBSD GitHub page quBSD really seems to build upon the best FreeBSD has to offer. Neat.
Speaking of Steam, the Linux version of Valve’s gaming platform has just received a pretty substantial set of fixes for crashes, and Timothee “TTimo” Besset, who works for Valve on Linux support, has published a blog post with more details about what kind of crashes they’ve been fixing. The Steam client update on November 5th mentions “Fixed some miscellaneous common crashes.” in the Linux notes, which I wanted to give a bit of background on. There’s more than one fix that made it in under the somewhat generic header, but the one change that made the most significant impact to Steam client stability on Linux has been a revamping of how we are approaching the setenv and getenv functions. One of my colleagues rightly dubbed setenv “the worst Linux API”. It’s such a simple, common API, available on all platforms that it was a little difficult to convince ourselves just how bad it is. I highly encourage anyone who writes software that will run on Linux at some point to read through “RachelByTheBay”‘s very engaging post on the subject. ↫ Timothee “TTimo” Besset This indeed seems to be a specific Linux problem, and due to the variability in Linux systems – different distributions, extensive user customisation, and so on – debugging information was more difficult to parse than on Windows and macOS. After a lot of work grouping the debug information to try and make sense of it all, it turned out that the two functions in question were causing issues in threads other than those that used them. They had to resort to several solutions, from reducing the reliance on setenv and refactoring it with exevpe, to reducing the reliance on getenv through caching, to introducing “an ‘environment manager’ that pre-allocates large enough value buffers at startup for fixed environment variable names, before any threading has started”. It was especially this last one that had a major impact on reducing the number of crashes with Steam on Linux. Besset does note that these functions are still used far too often, but that at this point it’s out of their control because that usage comes from the libraries of the operating system, like x11, xcb, dbus, and so on. Besset also mentions that it would be much better if this issue can be addressed in glibc, and in the comments, a user by the name of Adhemerval reports that this is indeed something the glibc team is working on.
Steam has finally stopped working on several older Windows operating systems, following a warning from Valve that it planned to drop support earlier this year. With little fanfare, Windows 7 and Windows 8 gaming on Steam is no longer possible following the most recent Steam client update on November 5. ↫ Ben Stockton at PCGamesN It’s honestly wild that Valve supported Windows 7 and 8 for this long for Steam in the first place. They’ve been out of support for a long time, and at this point in time, less than 0.3% of Steam users were using Windows 7 or 8. Investing any resources in continuing to support them would be financially irresponsible, while also aiding a tiny bit in allowing people to use such unsupported, insecure systems to this day. I’m sure at least one of you is still rocking Windows 7 or 8 as your daily driver operating system, so I’m sorry if you don’t want to hear this, but it’s really, really time to move on. Buying a Windows 10 or 11 license on eBay or whatever costs a few euros at most – if you’re not eligible for one the free upgrade programs Microsoft ran – and especially Windows 10 should run just fine on pretty much anything Windows 7 or 8 runs on. Do note that with Windows 10, though, you’ll be back in the same boat next year.
More bad news from Mozilla. The Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.” Announcing the layoffs in an email to all employees on October 30, the Mozilla Foundation’s executive director Nabiha Syed confirmed that two of the foundation’s major divisions — advocacy and global programs — are “no longer a part of our structure.” ↫ Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch This means Mozilla will no longer be advocating for an open web, privacy, and related ideals, which fits right in with the organisation’s steady decline into an ad-driven effort that also happens to be making a web browser used by, I’m sorry to say, effectively nobody. I just don’t know how many more signs people need to see before realising that the future of Firefox is very much at stake, and that we’re probably only a few years away from losing the only non-big tech browser out there. This should be a much bigger concern than it seems to be to especially the Linux and BSD world, who rely heavily on Firefox, without a valid alternative to shift to once the browser’s no longer compatible with the various open source requirements enforced by Linux distributions and the BSDs. What this could also signal is that the sword of Damocles dangling above Mozilla’s head is about to come down, and that the people involved know more than we do. Google is effectively bankrolling Mozilla – for about 80% of its revenue – but that deal has come under increasing scrutiny from regulars, and Google itself, too, must be wondering why they’re wasting money supporting a browser nobody’s using. We’re very close to a web ruled by Google and Apple. If that prospect doesn’t utterly terrify you, I honestly wonder what you’re doing here, reading this.
Earlier this year, a proposal was made to replace the primary edition of Fedora from the GNOME variant to the KDE variant. This proposal, while serious, was mostly intended to stir up discussion about the position of the Fedora KDE spin within the larger Fedora community, and it seems this has had its intended effect. A different, but related proposal, to make Fedora KDE equal in status to the Fedora GNOME variant, has been accepted. The original proposal read: After a few months of being live, the proposal has now been unanimously accepted, which means that starting with Fedora 42, the GNOME and KDE versions will have equal status, and thus will receive equal marketing and positioning on the website. Considering how many people really enjoy Fedora KDE, this is a great outcome, and probably the fairest way to handle the situation for a distribution as popular as Fedora. I use Fedora KDE on all my machines, so for me, this is great news.
LXQt, the desktop environment that is to KDE what Xfce is to GNOME, has released version 2.1.0, and while the version number change seems average, it’s got a big ace up its sleeve: you can now run LXQt in a Wayland session, and they claim it works quite well, too, and it supports a wide variety of compositors. Through its new component lxqt-wayland-session, LXQt 2.1.0 supports 7 Wayland sessions (with Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri), has two Wayland back-ends in lxqt-panel (one for kwin_wayland and the other general), and will add more later. All LXQt components that are not limited to X11 — i.e., most components — work fine on Wayland. The sessions are available in the new section Wayland Settings inside LXQt Session Settings. At least one supported Wayland compositor should be installed in addition to lxqt-wayland-session for it to be used. There is still hard work to do, but all of the current LXQt Wayland sessions are quite usable; their differences are about what the supported Wayland compositors provide. ↫ LXQt 2.1.0 release announcement This is great news for LXQt, as it ensures the desktop environment is ready to keep up with what modern Linux distributions provide. Crucially and in line with what we’ve come to expect from LXQt, X11 support is a core part of the project, and they even go so far as to say “the X11 session will be supported indefinitely”, which should set people preferring to stay on X11 at ease. I personally may have gleefully left X11 in the dustbin of history, but many among us haven’t, and it’s welcome to see LXQt’s clear promise here. Many of the other improvements in this release are tied to Wayland, making sure the various components work and Wayland settings can be adjusted. On top of that, there’s the usual list of bug fixes and smaller changes, too.
The current version of Windows on ARM contains Prism, Microsoft’s emulator that allows x86-64 code to run on ARM processors. While it was already relatively decent on the recent Snapdragon X platform, it could still be very hit-or-miss with what applications it would run, and especially games seemed to be problematic. As such, Microsoft has pushed out a major update to Prism that adds support for a whole bunch of extensions to the x86 architecture. This new support in Prism is already in limited use today in the retail version of Windows 11, version 24H2, where it enables the ability to run Adobe Premiere Pro 25 on Arm. Starting with Build 27744, the support is being opened to any x64 application under emulation. You may find some games or creative apps that were blocked due to CPU requirements before will be able to run using Prism on this build of Windows. At a technical level, the virtual CPU used by x64 emulated applications through Prism will now have support for additional extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture. These extensions include AVX and AVX2, as well as BMI, FMA, F16C, and others, that are not required to run Windows but have become sufficiently commonplace that some apps expect them to be present. You can see some of the new features in the output of a tool like Coreinfo64.exe. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc on the Windows Blog Hopefully this makes running existing x86 applications that don’t yet have an ARM version a more reliable affair for Windows on ARM users.
A long, long time ago, back when running BeOS as my main operating system had finally become impossible, I had a short stint running QNX as my one and only operating system. In 2004, before I joined OSNews and became its managing editor, I also wrote and published an article about QNX on OSNews, which is cringe-inducing to read over two decades later (although I was only 20 when I wrote that – I should be kind to my young self). Sadly, the included screenshots have not survived the several transitions OSNews has gone through since 2004. Anyway, back in those days, it was entirely possible to use QNX as a general purpose desktop operating system, mostly because of two things. First, the incredible Photon MicroGUI, an excellent and unique graphical environment that was a joy to use, and two, because of a small but dedicated community of enthousiasts, some of which QNX employees, who ported a ton of open source applications, from basic open source tools to behemoths like Thunderbird, the Mozilla Suite, and Firefox, to QNX. It even came with an easy-to-use package manager and associated GUI to install all of these applications without much hassle. Using QNX like this was a joy. It really felt like a tightly controlled, carefully crafted user experience, despite desktop use being so low on the priority list for the company that it might as well have not been on there at all. Not long after, I think a few of the people inside QNX involved with the QNX desktop community left the company, and the entire thing just fizzled out afterwards when the company was acquired by Harman Kardon. Not long after, it became clear the company lost all interest, a feeling only solidified once Blackberry acquired the company. Somewhere in between the company released some of its code under some not-quite-open-source license, accompanied by a rather lacklustre push to get the community interested again. This, too, fizzled out. Well, it seems the company is trying to reverse course, and has started courting the enthusiast community once again. This time, it’s called QNX Everywhere, and it involves making QNX available for non-commercial use for anyone who wants it. No, it’s not open source, and yes, it requires some hoops to jump through still, but it’s better than nothing. In addition, QNX also put a bunch of open source demos, applications, frameworks, and libraries on GitLab. One of the most welcome new efforts is a bootable QNX image for the Raspberry Pi 4 (and only the 4, sadly, which I don’t own). It comes with a basic set of demo application you can run from the command line, including a graphical web browser, but sadly, it does not seem to come with Photon microGUI or any modern equivalent. I’m guessing Photon hasn’t seen a ton of work since its golden days two decades ago, which might explain why it’s not here. There’s also a list of current open source ports, which includes chunks of toolkits like GTK and Qt, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Honestly, as cool as this is, it seems it’s mostly aimed at embedded developers instead of weird people who want to use QNX as a general purpose operating system, which makes total sense from QNX’ perspective. I hope Photon microGUI will make a return at some point, and it would be awesome – but I expect unlikely – if QNX could be released as open source, so that it would be more likely a community of enthusiasts could spring up around it. For now, without much for a non-developer like me to do with it, it’s not making me run out to buy a Raspberry Pi 4 just yet.
Old-school Apple fans probably remember a time, just before the iPhone became a massive gaming platform in its own right, when Apple released a wide range of games designed for late-model clickwheel iPods. While those clickwheel-controlled titles didn’t exactly set the gaming world on fire, they represent an important historical stepping stone in Apple’s long journey through the game industry. Today, though, these clickwheel iPod games are on the verge of becoming lost media—impossible to buy or redownload from iTunes and protected on existing devices by incredibly strong Apple DRM. Now, the classic iPod community is engaged in a quest to preserve these games in a way that will let enthusiasts enjoy these titles on real hardware for years to come. ↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica A nice effort, of course, and I’m glad someone is putting time and energy into preserving these games and making them accessible to a wider audience. As is usual with Apple, these small games were heavily encumbered with DRM, being locked to both the the original iTunes account that bought them, but also to the specific hardware identifier of the iPod they were initially synchronised to using iTunes. A clever way around this DRM exists, and it involves collectors and enthusiasts creating reauthorising their iTunes accounts to the same iTunes installation, and thus adding their respective iPod games to that single iTunes installation. Any other iPods can then be synced to that master account. The iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project takes this approach to the next level, by setting up a Windows virtual machine with iTunes installed in it, which can then be shared freely around the web for people to the games to their collection. This is a rather remarkably clever method of ensuring these games remain accessible, but obviously does require knowledge of setting up Qemu and USB passthrough. I personally never owned an iPod – I was a MiniDisc fanatic until my Android phone took over the role of music player – so I also had no clue these games even existed. I assume most of them weren’t exactly great to control with the limited input method of the iPod, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be huge numbers of people who have fond memories of playing these games when they were younger – and thus, they are worth preserving. We can only hope that one day, someone will create a virtual machine that can run the actual iPod operating system, called Pixo OS.
Nothing is sacred. With this update, we are introducing the ability to rewrite content in Notepad with the help of generative AI. You can rephrase sentences, adjust the tone, and modify the length of your content based on your preferences to refine your text. ↫ Dave Grochocki at the Windows Insider Blog This is the reason everything is going to shit.
Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server IoT 2025. This new release includes several improvements, including advanced multilayer security, hybrid cloud agility, AI, performance enhancements, and more. Microsoft claims that Windows Server IoT 2025 will be able to handle the most demanding workloads, including AI and machine learning. It now has built-in support for GPU partitioning and the ability to process large datasets across distributed environments. With Live Migration and High Availability, it also offers a high-performance platform for both traditional applications and advanced AI workloads. ↫ Pradeep Viswanathan at Neowin Windows Server IoT 2025 brings the same benefits, new features, and improvements as the just-released regular Windows Server 2025. I must admit I’m a little unclear as to what Windows Server IoT has to offer over the regular edition, and reading the various Microsoft marketing materials and documents don’t really make it any clearer for me either, since I’m not particularly well-versed in all that enterprise networking lingo.
