Monthly Archive:: September 2023
As mentioned on previous posts, I have spent the past few weeks dealing with a ZFS crash on my FreeNAS install. Because of that, not only was I forced to learn how to troubleshoot ZFS, but I also had to learn how to setup new volumes and come up with new backup strategies (between a few other things). This was a great opportunity for me to learn more about ZFS (because I new ‘nada’ to start with). And I’m happy to share some of the knowledge that I gathered with you on this post. Please keep in mind that I don’t consider myself an expert on ZFS (not even close), but I will try to make things simple and easy to understand for someone, who like me, is just getting started with ZFS. An excellent starting point for diving into ZFS.
Thunderbolt 5 will deliver 80 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bi-directional bandwidth, and with Bandwidth Boost it will provide up to 120 Gbps for the best display experience. These improvements will provide up to three times more bandwidth than the best existing connectivity solution, providing outstanding display and data connections. Thunderbolt 5 will meet the high bandwidth needs of content creators and gamers. Built on industry standards – including USB4 V2 – Thunderbolt 5 will be broadly compatible with previous versions of Thunderbolt and USB. That’s some serious speed for a cable.
Every release has a killer feature. Qt 6.6 features the opposite – staying alive. This blog post describes work to make Qt clients more robust and seemlessly migrate between compositors, providing resistance against compositor crashes and more. Qt 6.6 is bringing something to the Linux desktop we haven’t had yet: transparent recovery from display server crashes. The solution for this? Instead of exiting when the compositor closes, simply…don’t! If we could connect to a new compositor we just need to send the right amount of information to bring it in sync and notify the application code of any changes to bring this in sync. For Qt applications all this information is handled in the backend, in the Wayland Qt Platform Abstraction (QPA). Qt already has to handle screens and input devices being removed, clipboards being revoked and drag and drops cancelled. Supporting a whole reset isn’t introducing any new work, we just have to trigger all of these actions at once, then reconnect to the newly restored compositor and restore our contents. Applications already have to support all of these events too as well as handle callbacks to redraw buffers. There’s no changes needed at an application code level, it’s all done as transparently as possible. The benefits here are legion: you can run two different compositors on two different monitors. You can switch compositors at runtime. You can add new features without logging out and back in. Checkpoint restore in userspace, and more. All this made possible by Wayland – X.org cannot do any of these things.
With the release of Windows 10 21H2, Windows offers inbox support for Mopria compliant printer devices over network and USB interfaces via the Microsoft IPP Class Driver. This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on. Device experience customization is now available via the Print Support Apps that are distributed and automatically installed via the Windows Store. This framework improves reliability and performance by moving customization from the Win32 framework to the UWP software development framework. Finally, print device manufacturers no longer have to rebuild their software since this solution is supported across all Windows versions and editions. With these advancements in the Windows print platform, we are announcing the end of servicing of the legacy v3 and v4 Windows printer drivers. As this is an impactful change, end of servicing will be staged over multiple years. Printer drivers used to be an absolute hell on Windows. Whereas on Linux you just plug the printer in and Linux will find and use the printer without much issue, on Windows, you had to trawl vendor websites using obscure device names and minor version variations just to get the right driver installed – usually accompanied by a whole boatload or crapware. Things got better as Windows eventually started downloading printer drivers and accompanying OEM management software by itself, and it seems this is the next step in the process by moving the functionality from these often crappy printer management applications into Print Support Apps.
In the last few years, several other vendors have begun selling Mac ROM SIMMs too. Friendly competition is great, but it creates a potential dilemma for me if someone buys another vendor’s ROM SIMM and reprograms it with BMOW’s base ROM in order to get the on-the-fly ROM disk decompression and other features. It could turn into a situation where my base ROM software is subsidizing another competing product. To compound the problem, I didn’t have any clear usage policy or “license” for the base ROM to say whether this type of use was OK. Furthermore my FC8 compression algorithm is free open-source, but the BMOW base ROM which incorporates it is not. This all created a large gray area. I hope to clarify this now by making the BMOW base ROM image explicitly free for personal use with anybody’s own Mac ROM SIMM, no matter what vendor they purchased it from. This is the simplest and best way of resolving the ambiguity for the benefit of the classic Mac community. I only ask that you don’t resdistribute the base ROM image elsewhere – come back to the BMOW Mac ROM-inator II details page if you need to download the image. Excellent move.
Microsoft published a blog post on the Windows Insider Blog in late August with a vague statement saying that “Windows system components“ were to begin respecting the default web browser setting. Windows 10 and 11 regularly bypass this setting and force-open links in Microsoft Edge instead. In my extensive testing, I haven’t found any changes in the new Windows Insider version. The issue here, I think, is in the wording Microsoft used. Here’s the announcement: In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links. I think the issue lies in the term “Windows system components”. The author of the post, Vivaldi employee Daniel Aleksandersen, states he tested links inside “the new Copilot, Start menu, Search on the taskbar and desktop, Windows Spotlight, first-party apps (Outlook, Teams, News, Weather, and more), and Widgets on the taskbar (formerly called News and Weather).” However, I don’t think Microsoft was talking about any of those things. When I read that original announcements from Microsoft, I assumed “Windows system components” referred to links inside things like the Settings application, or various control panels. I have a feeling “system components” does not include applications, search, or things like the search functionality. Idiotic and unclear, I know, but Microsoft is known for arcane language and terminology that doesn’t make any sense to normal people outside the company. Of course, this is just my guess, so we’ll see how this plays out.
2 years ago, I learned of an open-source project called Graphics Gremlin (GG) by Eric Schlaepfer who runs the website Tubetime.us. It is an 8-bit ISA graphics card that supports display standards like Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA). CGA and MDA are display standards used by older IBM(-compatible) PCs in the 1980s. The frequencies and connectors used by CGA and MDA are no longer supported by modern monitors hence it is difficult for older PCs of the 1980s era to have modern displays connected to them without external adapters. GG addresses this problem by using techniques like scan doubling (for CGA) and increasing the vertical refresh rate (for MDA) then outputing to a relatively newer but still old VGA port. As neat as this project is, it does have a few limitations that the author tried to address: it doesn’t have modern outputs, which is becoming problematic with monitor makers no longer adding VGA ports, and it can’t display on two outputs at once. This article details his solutions.
Regular readers will know that I have a lot of love for the French Minitel system and own a couple. In the past I’ve written about using a Minitel 1B as a terminal and replacing the EPROM in a Minitel 2 to run custom firmware. Today I’m going to blog about a project called Minimit. The Minimit is a small, Minitel-shaped box that attaches to the Minitel’s DIN port and brings the Minitel experience back to life. The box contains an ESP32 which talks to the DIN port outputting Minitel-compatible text and graphics. And the graphics and letters appear slowly just as they would have in the 1980s. Minitel is such a fascinating topic and technology – Teletext, but more versatile. I’m so glad people are keeping it alive like this.
Back in 2021 Samsung engineers posted KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 server alternative to the likes of the user-space Samba server. KSMBD merged into Linux 5.15 as an experimental SMB server while after two years of fixes and other improvements has now dropped its “experimental” marking. The KSMBD in-kernel SMB3 server is now formally declared stable with Linux 6.6 in removing its experimental tag. Neat.
A major change introduced by iPadOS 17 that is going to make video creators and gamers happy is support for UVC (USB Video Class) devices, which means an iPad can now recognize external webcams, cameras, video acquisition cards, and other devices connected over USB-C. I started testing iPadOS 17 thinking this would be a boring addition I’d never use; as it turns out, it’s where I had the most fun tinkering with different pieces of hardware this summer. Most of all, however, I did not anticipate I’d end up doing FaceTime calls with a Game Boy Camera as my iPad Pro’s webcam. This is amazing.
The person doing that maintenance, as well as making sure that about 70 of the best known indie games from the same era keep running, is Ethan Lee. He’s not as well known as Fez’s developer Phil Fish, who was also the subject of the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, but this week Lee started publicly marketing the service he’s been quietly providing for over 11 years: maintenance of older games. Usually, when video game publishers talk about revisiting older games they talk about “remasters,” lavish reproductions that not only make them playable, but update their graphics or make them more modern in some way. Lee chose the word “maintenance” intentionally to describe what he does. Doing the lord’s work.
Enter the trustbusters, led by Senator John Sherman, author of the 1890 Sherman Act, America’s first antitrust law. In arguing for his bill, Sherman said to the Senate: “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” In other words, when a company gained too much power, it became the same kind of kingly authority that the colonists overthrew in 1776. Government “by the people, of the people, and for the people” was incompatible with concentrated corporate power from companies so large that they were able to determine how people lived their lives, made their incomes, and structured their cities and towns. Break up big tech. Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook – they need to be chopped up into smaller parts that need to compete with one another. The amount of life this will breathe into the economy, as well as the burst of innovation that it will cause, will do more for people’s lives than a trillion nonsense trickle-down policies that favour the rich and powerful.
We’ve got new merch! The first round of merch turned out to be more popular than I thought, so it’s time to shake things up a bit and get some fresh new stuff in the official OSNews merch store. Before we start, if you want the limited edition quote T-shirt or quote mug, you have to be quick – I’ll be removing them from the store somewhere in the coming days, and they’ll never come back. This is your last chance to show the world how awesome Eugenia is. The first new product is by popular demand – a mug with just the OSNews logo, no quote. There’s really nothing to add here – it’s a mug, it holds liquid. Go nuts. Second, I’ve added a few new colour options to the basic logo T-shirt: night sky navy, revolution red, and white sand. They look pretty great. And I saved the best for last: a brand new T-shirt and sweatshirt, with the ASCII OSNews logo I use for our Gemini capsule. Of course, it comes in the only valid colour combination: phosphor green on black. The Gemini T-shirt goes for the same price as the other T-shirts – $29.99 – and is also made of the same organic cotton as the others. The longsleeve Gemini Sweatshirt goes for $39.99, to maintain that roughly $8 of every product sold that goes to OSNews, and is made from an 80/20 ringspun cotton/polyester blend. If I may say so myself – I think these two terminal shirts look stunning, and I’m quite proud of how they turned out. And thanks to everyone who has already bought merch since we launched the store – it means the world to me!
SoftBank has been gearing up anchor investments in Arm Holdings among its clients and partners for months now (ahead of the upcoming IPO) and apparently Intel is among them. In a call for the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference, the head of the company’s foundry business unit confirmed that the chip giant has made an investment in Arm because its technology is strategically important for both Intel Foundry Services and Altera FPGA unit. This doesn’t seem to be an indicator Intel is interested in making ARM chips – it seems to have more to do with Intel becoming a fab for other companies’ ARM chips.
Do you need software and hardware accelerated graphics drivers for Windows 9x running inside a virtual machine? Well, here’s SoftGPU, which will give you just that in Bochs, VirtualBox, Qemu, or VMware, for Windows 95, 98, or ME. The Github page provides detailed instructions on setting up the optimal virtual machines, and information about what, exactly, each virtual machine and diver supports and doesn’t support. On top of that, there’s links to a number of YouTube videos showing the driver in action. Excellent work, and this will allow you to get the most out of your Windows 9x virtual machines.
What, you thought we were done with the operating systems written in Rust? Oh sweet summer child. rxv64 is a pedagogical operating system written in Rust that targets multiprocessor x86_64 machines. It is a reimplementation of the xv6 operating system from MIT. As a pedagogical system, it supports very little hardware other than the text-mode CGA device, serial port, PS/2 keyboard controller, and PCIe AHCI SATA storage devices. xv6, in turn, is a reimplementation of Sixth Edition UNIX in C for x86 and RISC-V, widely used in teaching operating systems courses at various universities.
In the recent past I have discussed the Book 8088 and the Hand 386, which are newly made vintage computing systems. I concluded that those products, although not uninteresting were rather flawed. The Book 8088 was by far the more disappointing of the two devices. I have also been made aware of a project which tries to fulfill a similar niche, the NuXT motherboard. The NuXT is an 8088-based motherboard you can buy brand new and can really fill that IBM PC-clone hole in your vintage collection. While I do not own one of these, I have read and seen enough about it to give my thoughts on whether this product would be right for you. The NuXT 2.0 looks like an incredible motherboard for fans of the original IBM PC and its clones – especially with the prices of working original machines going through the roof as supply dwindles and demand skyrockets.
As best I can tell, there is no broad consensus on how large a kilobyte is. Some say that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes while others say it’s 1024 bytes. Others are ambiguous. This also means that the industry does not agree on the size of megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, and so on. Not entirely new information to most of us, I would presume, but in my head canon a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, even though that technically doesn’t make any sense from a metric perspective. To make matters worse, as soon as we get into the gigabytes and terabytes, I tend to back to thinking in terms of thousands again since it just makes more sense. The kibibytes and cohorts are a way to properly distance the base 2 system from the base 10 one, but I’ve never heard anyone in day-to-day speech make that distinctions outside of really nerdy circles.
Don’t let Chrome’s big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome’s invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the “Privacy Sandbox,” is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven’t been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it’s built directly into the Chrome browser. It’s been in the news previously as “FLoC” and then the “Topics API,” and despite widespread opposition from just about every non-advertiser in the world, Google owns Chrome and is one of the world’s biggest advertising companies, so this is being railroaded into the production builds. Google seemingly knows this won’t be popular. Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page. The blog post says the ad platform is hitting “general availability” today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users. This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done. Don’t use Chrome or any of its derivatives. If you care about privacy and the open web, use Firefox or one of its even more privacy-conscious alternatives, such as LibreWolf. Chrome has always been deeply problematic, but with this ridiculous “Privacy Sandbox”, the browser has effectively become a tool to show you ads first, and a browse second. Mark my words – the total gutting of adblocking in Chrome is up next.
Created by Mozilla Research in 2012, the Servo project was the first major Rust codebase other than the compiler itself, and has since been a hallmark for experimental web engine design. Major components of Servo have been incorporated into the Firefox web browser, and several of its parsers and other lower-level libraries have become foundational to the Rust ecosystem. As a promising, modern, and open web engine for building applications and immersive experiences using web technologies, stewardship of Servo moved from Mozilla Research to the Linux Foundation in 2020. In 2023, Servo experienced renewed activity led by Igalia, a Linux Foundation Europe member that now has a team of engineers working on the project. Today we are pleased to announce that the Servo project has officially joined Linux Foundation Europe. I’m very curious to see where Servo goes in the future.
