In addition to Linux 6.10 expected to drop support for very old DEC Alpha processors (EV5 and earlier), it looks like the PowerPC 40x (early PowerPC 400 series) processor and platform support will be retired too.

Back in 2020 was a proposal for dropping PowerPC 40x support from the Linux kernel given that the code was orphaned for a long time with no apparent users. The PowerPC 40x processors were found in thin clients, set-top boxes, and other devices during the 90’s. Finally now it looks like that the PowerPC 40x removal is set to happen.

↫ Michael Larabel

Spring cleaning in the hardware support department. I wonder what has more users – Windows on ARM, or Linux on PowerPC 40x.

Windows 11 supports a variety of ARM processors from Qualcomm. According to the official documentation, you need a computer with the Snapdragon 850 processor inside or newer to run the current operating system officially. However, customers with PCs powered by the Snapdragon 835, the original Windows on ARM chip from 2016, can bypass hardware requirements and install Windows 11 at their own risk. Sadly, those days will be ending soon.

Starting with Windows 11 version 24H2, Microsoft’s operating system requires ARM v8.1 to run. An attempt to boot it from a device with an ARM v8.0-based processor results in system crashes. For reference, the Snapdragon 835 from 2016 is a chip with Kryo 280 cores, which are derivative of ARM’s Cortex-A73 cores.

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

I’m sure all three Windows on ARM users are devastated.

That’s right: it’s PowerPC, the most unloved of the architectures CE ever ran on — in fact, this is the first PowerPC Windows CE device I’ve ever found, and I’m the self-described biggest pro-PowerPC bigot in the world. Here’s an unusual form factor Windows CE device, running on the operating system’s least used CPU, from a storied computer company near the end of its run, intended for medical applications, produced in very small numbers and cancelled within months.

What are we going to do with it? Well, what do you think we’re gonna do with it? We’re going to program it, so that we can finally have some software! And, of course, since this wacky thing was there at the bitter end, we’ll talk more about the last days of Data General and what happened next.

↫ Cameron Kaiser

I knew Windows CE supported PowerPC, but I never knew any PowerPC-based Windows CE devices ever actually shipped and made it to market. Only Windows CE 2.0 seems to have supported the architecture, and it seems to have been eliminated in 3.0 and 4.0, so it’s not surprising there weren’t many PowerPC Windows CE devices out there. The device that’s the subject of this article, too, only lasted on the market for a few months, so it’s definitely a rarity.

Still rocking your Palm OS device, but mutter under your breath every time you need to log into a website or service with two-factor authentication? Sick of carrying around an Android or iOS device just so you can log in on your Palm PDA? Worry no more, your prayers have been answered, you can finally throw that Android or iOS garbage into the sun.

Get your 2-factor codes on your Palm, just like Google Authenticator. Unlike Hotpants (an old port of a J2ME phone app), this version takes up much less space and supports all Palm OS versions.

↫ Nathan Korth

You can now generate 2FA codes on your Palm device. This is wild, and I absolutely love it. I might if set it up on one of my dozens of Palm OS devices and just put it next to my keyboard for easy access. There’s no cooler way to handle 2FA than this.

But the biggest differential factor between BSDs and GNU/Linux is the way it is structured.

In Linux, all components are designed to work together, but are completely separate. You’ve got the kernel, init systems, multimedia daemons, userland, bootloader, virtualization and containerization mechanisms, package managers, and so on. They are all separate projects with their own goals and are operated by separate entities. This is why we’ve got different Linux Distributions instead of Operating System. Everyone can take the kernel, start adding components on top of it, and a few minutes later the DistroWatch is even harder to keep up with.

Each BSD on the other hand is designed as single system. All components are created and developed together. Things work together perfectly, because they are designed, coded, tested and released as one.

↫ Michał Sapka

As I’ve mentioned here and there over the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring the world of BSD lately, and after bouncing of FreeBSD I’ve found a very happy home on OpenBSD. Now, this doesn’t mean I’m now a full-time OpenBSD user or anything like that – Linux is the main operating system on my gaming PC, my laptop, and my workstation, and that’s not going to be changing any time soon. However, after installing, exploring, and using OpenBSD on a machine cobbled together from spare and older parts, I can definitely see the appeal.

OpenBSD feels more coherent than a Linux distribution – I use Fedora KDE, if that matters – and the various lower-level systems seem to talk to each other in ways that make more intuitive sense than the individually developed systems in a Linux distribution do. Diving into the command-line interface of a Linux distribution can sometimes feel confusing because different tools use different conventions, because they’re developed by entirely different people and projects, with different ideas about how flags should work, how output should be presented, and so on. On OpenBSD, it seems much easier to carry over something you learn from one tool to the next. I simply feel more secure and knowledgeable, even if it’s still the same idiot me.

The documentation plays a big role here. They’re in one place, written in a consistent style, and reference each other left and right, making it easy to find your way around to other commands or tools you haven’t yet considered using. On Linux, you’re going from one project’s documentation to another project’s documentation, and not only will the style change, the quality will also vary greatly.

That’s not to say everything’s perfect on OpenBSD – it’s clearly a hardened server operating system, and its focus on security will definitely throw up annoying hurdles if you’re just trying to do workstation things. Firefox, for instance, is hobbled by strict security rules through unveil, which makes perfect sense for what OpenBSD is first and foremost trying to be, but if you’re just a regular user like me, it’s annoying that Firefox can only access ~/Downloads, or that it can’t set itself as the default browser so unless you disable that check, Firefox will keep complaining about it. Diving into Firefox and unveil is on my list, though, because you should be able to ‘fix’ this.

Furthermore, while every piece of software, or an equivalent, is pretty much always available for Linux, on OpenBSD it’s more hit and miss, and it seems to take a bit longer for new releases of especially bigger software packages to get updated. I mean, there’s obviously no Steam on OpenBSD, but smaller, less well-known projects generally also don’t support OpenBSD, so you’re either going to be compiling things yourself or hope someone packages it up for OpenBSD.

Then there’s the various vanity things we’ve come to expect from modern Linux distributions, like slick, fully graphical boot and shutdown sequences, detailed graphical tools for managing your packages, graphical firmware and driver managers, and so on. OpenBSD has none of these things, and while that’s no issue for me, I can see how it would throw other people off.

FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the few others often kind of get lost in all the Linux, Windows, and macOS violence, and to be quite honest – I feel like many people in the BSD community seem mostly okay with that. If you’ve never spent any serious time using any of the BSDs, but you’re interested in operating systems and don’t mind spending a few hours learning how to manipulate your system through CLI tools – dive in. There’s a ton of fun to be had, and things to learn.

For now, I’m continuing my exploration of OpenBSD, and if things keep going as well as they are, I may consider at least switching over the workstation in my office from Fedora KDE to OpenBSD – but I highly doubt it’ll ever make its way to my gaming desktop or my laptop.

Game of Trees (Got) is a version control system which prioritizes ease of use and simplicity over flexibility.

Got is still under development; it is being developed on OpenBSD and its main target audience are OpenBSD developers.

Got uses Git repositories to store versioned data. Git can be used for any functionality which has not yet been implemented in Got. It will always remain possible to work with both Got and Git on the same repository.

↫ Game of Trees website

OpenBSD is developing Game of Trees because they want a version control system that adheres to OpenBSD coding conventions, implements various OpenBSD security practices, and uses nothing but BSD-licensed code. It’s important to note, as its developers make very clear, that GoT is not in any way intended as a replacement for git.

Do any of you remember the browser Dillo? The project’s been through a rough few years after the main developer of the layout engine sadly passed away, the lead developer disappeared from the project, the dillo.org domain was lost and taken over by spammers – but now there’s new people at the helm, and the browser just released it first new version since 2015. Dillo 3.1.0 brings a whole host of new features and improvements.

• Add support for floating HTML elements, which involved a big redesign.
• Add support for OpenSSL, LibreSSL and mbed TLS for HTTPS, which is now enabled by default.
• Add a CI pipeline to build Dillo on Ubuntu, MacOS, FreeBSD and Windows (via cygwin).
• Add automatic HTML rendering tests.
• Improve and extend the Dillo manual.

↫ Dillo 3.1.0 announcement

Dillo is open source, uses the FLTK toolkit, and runs on Linux, BSD, MacOS, Windows (Cygwin), and more.

To support Zero Trust deployments trying to lock down devices to only access approved network destinations, we are announcing the development of Zero Trust DNS (ZTDNS) in a future version of Windows. ZTDNS was designed to be interoperable by using network protocols from open standards to satisfy Zero Trust requirements such as those found in OMB M-22-09 and NIST SP 800-207. ZTDNS will be helpful to any administrator trying to use domain names as a strong identifier of network traffic.

ZTDNS integrates the Windows DNS client and the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) to enable this domain-name-based lockdown. First, Windows is provisioned with a set of DoH or DoT capable Protective DNS servers; these are expected to only resolve allowed domain names. This provisioning may also contain a list of IP address subnets that should always be allowed (for endpoints without domain names), expected Protective DNS server certificate identities to properly validate the connection is to the expected server, or certificates to be used for client authentication.

↫ Tommy Jensen on the Microsoft blog

If you think I know nothing about programming – wait until you hear me talk about networking. I consider it to basically be arcane magic, and my knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond “plug in cable to make light blinky” and “unplug from power to fix light no blinky”. Network administrators are the real heroes in my eyes.

Anyway, what I do get from painfully reading this announcement over and over again until my eyes started bleeding is that ZTDNS will give network administrators more finegrained control over which DNS servers and domains are accessible, and perhaps more importantly, it will encrypt traffic between clients and the DNS server. I have no idea if this is unique, or if it even makes any sense to do so, but it seems like a good idea, especially for corporate and government networks.

I’m struggling here, y’all. Please help me out.

FreeBSD is working on a graphical installer. Finally.

The first hurdle to overcome when testing a new Operating System is to get it installed. What is more, the first impression new users gather from an Operating System is its installation process. The state of the art for Operating System installers nowadays definitely involves a graphical process. This is the case for mainstream systems but also for other UNIX systems comparable to FreeBSD: RedHat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, or even Devuan GNU+Linux Regardless of the technical level of the actual user, this is how the platform will be compared in the public eye.

[…]

Instead, with knowledge of the current bsdinstall(8) and bsdconfig(8) utilities, I envisioned a BSD-licensed replacement for Xdialog(1). Just like when invoking bsdconfig with the -X switch for graphical mode, it could be dropped in instead of bsddialog(1) and allow graphical installation – while sharing the infrastructure of the current installer. To avoid confusion with the current implementation of Xdialog from the x11/xdialog port, I have named its replacement gbsddialog(1). It also has to be said that Xdialog is quite obsolete (latest release in 2006) and this shows visually too.

↫ Pierre Pronchery in the FreeBSD status report

I can’t believe it’s taken FreeBSD this long to both consider and build a graphical installer. Currently being enveloped in the world of OpenBSD, there’s clearly so much the BSD world has to offer to desktop users such as myself, but at the same time, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that the various BSDs can address to make the experience just that little bit more pleasant. They obviously don’t have to – not every project is aiming at desktop use – but it just makes onboarding so much nicer.

The next step – perhaps in 2037 – would be to offer a desktop-oriented installation image, with a default desktop environment and settings optimised for desktop use. Right now, a lot of fiddling and optimisation for this use case is left to the user, and for newcomers such as myself this means a lot of reading, making sense of contradictory advice and suggestions, wading through endless, often outdated, online guides, and so on. Now, I don’t particularly mind doing this, but I’m sure it’s chasing people away who could end up making meaningful contributions.

Meanwhile, after trying out FreeBSD for a while a few weeks ago but it not being a good fit for me, I’m now exploring and using OpenBSD and it’s been a great experience. Although unlikely, I hope OpenBSD, too, can perhaps consider making some minor affordances to desktop users – because as I’ve learnt, OpenBSD feels right at home on a desktop, more so than I ever expected.

COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE) is a new project by System76, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Pop!_OS. In this tutorial, we will give you an overview about COSMIC DE and its features, and then we will walk you through the steps to install COSMIC Desktop Environment in the latest Fedora 40 Linux system.

↫ Senthilkumar Palani at OSTechNix

A very easy way to try out the current pre-alpha state of COSMIC. I’ll definitely be waiting on a more official release later this year, but man, does COSMIC ever seem way more polished and complete than it has any right to be at this point in time.

This is, in a way, a mature OS with an ecosystem and an aftermarket. (Which, we feel we must explicitly spell out, means that quite a few of those third-party applications and drivers will cost you money.) There are emulators that will let you run 20th century Acorn apps that you can find online, but this isn’t an emulated vintage environment like Amiga Forever. It’s not meant for running games from thirty years ago. This is a native bare-metal OS, built on 1980s roots but updated for 21st century hardware. It’s also not an experimental project with little practical use, like Redox OS or Serenity OS, interesting though those are.

↫ Liam Proven at The Register

I grew up with RISC OS and still run a RISC OS machine to this day. As Liam Proven explains affectionately in this article, while as an operating system it’s missing many features we now take for granted (memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, compositing), some of the user interface ideas it implements still manage to feel advanced compared to modern-day desktops (no need for menu bars, no clunky file dialogues, elegant mouse button assignments). The fact it’s found a home on the Raspberry Pi and continues to support an active community is testament to its enduring appeal and the amazing work of the RISC OS Open project.

Some additional notes from Thom: this new release supports 7 ARM platforms, most notably the Raspberry Pi Zero, 1, 2, 3 and 4 (but not the 5), and it even supports WiFi on the 3 and 4, which is an absolutely incredible achievement. The number of fixed bugs and addressed issues is massive, and there’s even more to come later during the year, as The Register’s article notes.

I was waiting on this release to spur me on to buy a new Raspberry Pi (my only other Pi is our Pi-Hole), so I’ll definitely be on the lookout for a good deal. This release deserves my full attention for OSNews.

Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college’s General Electric GE-225 mainframe.

Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.

↫ Benj Edwards at Ars Technica

Even I have used BASIC in the past, when I was a child and discovered QBasic (or possibly GW-BASIC, I’m a bit hazy on the details) and started messing around with it. My experiences with BASIC didn’t lead to a path of ever more complex programming languages, but for huge numbers of people, it did – it’s wild just how many people over a certain age got their programming start with BASIC in the 8 bit home computer era.

I mean, 30 GOTO 10 is such a widespread morsel of knowledge it made its way into all kinds of popular media, such as a few Easter egg jokes in Futurama. BASIC has effectively achieved immortality.

Years of accumulated security debt at Microsoft are seemingly crashing down upon the company in a manner that many critics warned about, but few ever believed would actually come to light. 

Microsoft is an entrenched enterprise provider, owning nearly one-quarter of the global cloud infrastructure services market and, as of Q1 last year, nearly 20% of the worldwide SaaS application market, according to Synergy Research Group.

Though not immune to scandal, in the wake of two major nation-state breaches of its core enterprise platforms, Microsoft is facing one of its most serious reputational crises.

↫ David Jones at Cybersecurity Dive

It’s almost like having the entire US government dependent on a single vendor is a bad idea.

Just spitballing here.

With 14.9, Vanguard, Riot’s proprietary Anti-Cheat system will be deployed and active in League of Legends. This means that active enforcement of Vanguard will be in effect and working hard to make sure your queues are free from scripters, botters, and cheaters! We recently released a blog detailing the “why” behind bringing Vanguard to League that you can check out here. It’s a bit of a long read, but it does have some pictures.

↫ Lilu Cabreros in the League of Legends patch notes

The basic gist is that Vanguard is a closed-source, kernel-level rootkit for Windows that runs at all times, with the supposed goal of detecting and banning cheaters from playing League of Legends. This being a rootkit designed specifically to inject itself into the Windows kernel, it won’t work on Linux, and as such, the entire League on Linux community, which has been playing League for years now and even at times communicated with Riot employees to keep the game running, is now gone.

Interestingly enough, Riot is not implementing Vanguard on macOS, which League of Legends also supports – because Apple simply doesn’t allow it.

This is probably the most invasive, disturbing form of anticheat we’ve seen so far, especially since it involves such a hugely popular game. It’s doubly spicy because Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese company, which means a company owned and controlled by the Chinese government now has rootkits installed on the roughly 150 million players’ computers all over the world. While we’re all (rightly, in my opinion) worried about TikTok, China just slipped 150 million rootkits onto computers all over the world.

One really has to wonder where these increasingly invasive, anti-privacy and anti-user anticheat measures are going from here. Now that this rootkit can keep tabs on literally every single thing you do on your Windows computer, what’s going to be the next step? Anticheat might have to move towards using webcams to watch you play to prevent you from cheating, because guess what? The next level of cheating is already here, and it doesn’t even involve your computer.

Earlier this year, hardware maker MSI showed off a gaming monitor that uses “AI” to see what’s going on on your monitor, and then injects overlays onto your monitor to help you cheat. MSI showed off how the monitor will use the League of Legends minimap to follow enemy champions and other relevant content, and then show warnings on your screen when enemies approach from off-screen. All of this happens entirely on the monitor’s hardware, and never sends any data whatsoever to the computer it’s attached to. It’s cheating that literally cannot be detected by anything running on your computer, rootkit or not.

So, the only logical next step as such forms of cheating become more advanced and widespread is to force users to turn on their webcams, and point them at their displays.

I fired up League of Legends today on my gaming computer – which runs Linux, of course – and after the League client “installed” the rootkit, it just got stuck in an endless loop of asking me to restart the client. I’ve been playing League of Legends for close to 14 years, and while I know the game – and especially its community – has a deservedly so bad reputation, I’ve always enjoyed the game with friends, and especially with my wife, who’s been playing for years and years as well.

Speaking of my wife – even though she runs Windows and could easily install the rootkit if she wanted to, she has some serious doubts about this. When I explained what the Vanguard rootkit can do, her mouse pointer slowly moved away from the “Update” button, saying, “I’m not so sure about this…”