So the Japanese market had very specific requirements, that PCs could not fulfill in the early DOS days. You couldn’t just replace the character ROM on your PC and make it display Japanese text (IBM did later develop the 5550 and the JX, a derivative of the PCjr, specifically for the Japanese market, and later, they developed the DOS/V variant, which added support for Japanese text to their PS/2 line, using standard VGA hardware, which by now had caught up in terms of resolution). Instead, Japanese companies jumped into the niche of developing business machines for the home market. Most notably NEC. In 1981 they introduced the PC-8800 series, an 8-bit home computer based on a Z80 CPU and BASIC. In 1982, the PC-9800 series followed, a more high-end 16-bit business-oriented personal computer based on an 8086 CPU and MS-DOS. These families of machines became known as PC-88 and PC-98 respectively (Note that the ‘PC’ name here is not a reference to IBM, as NEC had already released the PC-8000 series in 1979). I love these machines.
Several weeks ago, we published an article detailing five not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11. Recommended websites in the Start menu (introduced in build 25247) appear in the list as arguably one of Microsoft’s worst ideas. Luckily, the company has decided to backtrack that controversial change. Those unhappy with Windows 11 showing more ads on the Start menu will be glad to learn that developers removed recommended websites in the latest preview build. A bit of positive news on the ads-in-Windows front for once.
Last year, Ubuntu developers pushed to remove Zsys from Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer. This is an integral tool Ubuntu created to make it easier to manage and maintain ZFS-based installations. In a bug report they bluntly noted that ‘priority changes’ in the desktop team meant Zsys was no longer something they want to “advertise using”. As of writing, Zsys remains available in the Ubuntu archives but development of it isn’t looking healthy. Canonical’s contributions effectively fall off a cliff circa April 2021 based on GitHub commits, with only a trivial tweak made in April of last year. Daily builds for the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release come with a brand-new installer that has been built using Flutter to Canonical’s exact needs. But guess what this new Ubuntu installer does not include? An option to install Ubuntu on the ZFS file system. I thought the Linux world had settled on Btrfs as the “ZFS-like” file system for the platform, and had no idea Canonical had even been working on giving users the option to install to ZFS. With Btrfs already being the default on e.g. Fedora for a while now, it seems that is a better route to go for Ubuntu and other distributions than trying to make ZFS work.
At CES today, Sony gave a look at its latest PlayStation 5 gaming controller, but this one is very different from its previous designs. Aimed at lowering the barrier of entry for players with disabilities, Project Leonardo for the PS5 is a highly customizable controller kit that has been developed with help from organizations such as AbleGamers, SpecialEffect and Stack Up. The unique-looking controller does not have an official name nor a price attached to it yet, but Sony gave an in depth look at its features today. The unique design is said to help players with limited motor control, letting them use the controller for long periods and be accurate without much difficulty. This is very similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller, and a very welcome product for those with disabilities.
DragonFly version 6.4 is the next step in the 6.x release series. This version has hardware support for type-2 hypervisors with NVMM, an amdgpu driver, the experimental ability to remote-mount HAMMER2 volumes, and many other changes. The details of all commits between the 6.2 and 6.4 releases are available in the associated commit messages for 6.4.0. The downloads are ready.
Google’s keynote at the RISC-V Summit was all about bold proclamations, though. Lars Bergstrom, Android’s director of engineering, wants RISC-V to be seen as a “tier-1 platform” in Android, which would put it on par with Arm. That’s a big change from just six months ago. Bergstrom says getting optimized Android builds on RISC-V will take “a lot of work” and outlined a roadmap that will take “a few years” to come to fruition, but AOSP started to land official RISC-V patches back in September. Another vote of confidence for RISC-V.
It’s 2023, and Windows 11 is finally a mature operating system that most people would be happy to use. Sun Valley has finally arrived, and it’s all about a long overdue reinvestment in design under Panos Panay’s leadership. But is it enough? Let’s take a look. For the purpose of this research, I used Windows 11 build 25267, which as of now is the latest Insider Dev build. Death, taxes, and new windows theme layers.
Vanilla OS has released its first version. Vanilla OS is an immutable desktop Linux distribution that brings some interesting new technologies to the table, such as the Apx package manager. By default, Apx provides a container based on your Linux distribution (Ubuntu 22.10 for Vanilla OS 22.10) and wraps all commands from the distribution’s package manager (apt for Ubuntu). Nevertheless, you can install packages from other package distributions. For example, using the --aur flag, a new container based on Arch Linux will be created. Here, apx will manage the packages from the AUR (Pacman and yay), tightly integrating them with the host system. Using the --dnf flag with apx will create a new container based on Fedora Linux. Here, apx will manage packages from Fedora’s DNF repository, tightly integrating them with the host system. Another tentpole technology is ABRoot, which brings atomicity to this distribution. Atomicity is the ability to perform a specific operation in a way where if it fails, nothing will be changed and if it succeeds, the changes will be applied in their entirety. ABRoot achieves this by transacting between 2 root file systems: A and B. Let’s make an example. Let’s say you want to install a new package. ABRoot will check which partition is the present root partition (i.e A), then it will mount an overlay on top of it and perform the transaction. If the transaction succeeds, the overlay will be merged with the future root partition (i.e B). On your next boot, the system will automatically switch to the new root partition (B). In case of failure, the overlay will be discarded and the system will boot normally, without any changes to either partition. Vanilla OS looks incredibly interesting, and I’m definitely keeping an eye on it.
A rant about “year of Linux on the desktop” from a tired old man. I’ve been part of the Linux community since before Linux was called Linux. Over the years there’s been many people telling me directly that Linux is silly or wrong or imperfect, or that free and open source software is foolish or pointless. A lot more people have, of course, pontificated along those lines in public, and not directed it at me. I’m not claiming to be targeted at that, but I’ve been around and active for long enough that things accumulate. It’s the end of a long year for me, and I though I’d let off some steam myself. Hence this rant. Over time, the goal posts of success keep being moved by the naysayers. I’m too tired to dig up all important milestones and dates, or references, but here’s highlights of the timeline as I have experienced it (years may be a little off). The most popular operating system in the world by a huge margin, and yet, it still gets ridiculed by users of platforms that still have to manually install drivers and update applications by hand while getting spied on left, right, and centre. Strange times we live in.
WuMgr (Update Manager for Windows) is a tool to manage updates of Microsoft products on the Windows operating system. It uses the “Windows Update Agent API” to identify as well as download and install missing updates. It allows the user fine control of updates on modern (Windows 10) operating system versions, comparable to what windows 7 and 8.1 offered. This functionality should be included in Windows by default, and the fact that it isn’t is just one of the many laughable deficiencies Windows is riddled with. And speaking of laughable deficiencies in Windows, a third party user interface to the optional and limited winget package “manager” has recently been updated.
We are excited to announce the release of Formula Suggestions and Formula by Example for Excel web users – a couple exciting capabilities designed to help save you time and learn more about Excel formulas as you use them. Also for web users are suggested links, IMAGE function, and a new search bar in the queries pane. For Windows users, a new keyboard shortcut is available to open the Power Query editor, and Insiders users on Windows can now get data from dynamic arrays and create nested Power Query data types to better organize your data. There’s this whole massive community of wizards out there, and their school of magic is Excel. It baffles me what people can do with this program, yet it’s often ridiculed and ignored despite the sheer skill needed to get the most out of it.
Several months ago I had a go at producing a high resolution 256-color driver for Windows 3.1. The effort was successful but is not yet complete. Along the way I re-learned many things I had forgotten, and learned several new ones. This blog entry is based on notes I made during development. There’s tons of lessons to re-learn when focusing on older platforms, whether as a mere user exploring or reminiscing, or as a developer trying to deal with all the constraints and limitations these old systems bring to the table. I’m glad it’s being documented, because the older these platforms get, the less we’ll remember about them.
This week I received a new 12th Gen Intel laptop from Framework. And like with any new piece of hardware I get these days, my first instinct was to put NixOS on it. But I wasn’t just content with firing up the NixOS installer and getting to work. Oh no no no. You see, I knew there was a better way. I didn’t now exactly what that better way looked like just yet, but I could feel in my bones that it existed. So I did what I usually do when I suspect there’s a better way of doing something in Nix land and pinged Mic92. What you’ll read in the rest of this post is the result of our conversations. NixOS seems incredibly cool, but at the same time, it also seems obtuse and complex, and like any Linux system, it has its share of problems, too. I’m just not entirely sure if it’s of any value to most regular desktop Linux users, or if it is almost exclusively aimed at developers. Since NixOS seems to be popping up in comments all over the web, I’m trying to keep an eye on it and understand what, exactly, it offers over competing products.
The HP LaserJet III laser printer from 1990 used the “Printer Command Language” PCL 5 by default, but could be upgraded with the “HP PostScript Cartridge Plus” cartridge, which contained 2 MB of ROM with Adobe’s PostScript Level 2 rasterizer. Let’s look at the ROM contents and some of its hidden gems. With how printers have become the butt of jokes, it’s easy to forget they were sometimes kind of cool and had interesting technologies, features, and even expansions. The article has a follow-up, as well.
The fourth beta for Haiku R1 over a year and a half of hard work to improve Haiku’s hardware support and its overall stability, and to make lots more software ports available for use. Over 400 bugs and enhancement tickets have been resolved for this release. There’s a lot here to talk about. The improved support for HiDPI looks amazing, and definitely a must-have in today’s world of 4K displays. There’s lots of new and improved drivers, including a new compatibility layer for OpenBSD WiFi drivers, a new NTFS driver, and more. The number of ports has increased by a lot thanks to X11, Gtk+, and even Wayland compatibility – Inkscape, GIMP, GNOME Web, and more. Wine has also been ported to Haiku, using a Haiku-native windowing and input backend. And much, much more. Pretty good way to start Christmas.
With that initial explanation out of the way, in 2022 I’ve been getting my Chumby working with the mainline Linux kernel and slowly trying to submit fixes upstream for issues as I find them. To be clear, I’m not trying to get the stock Chumby software working with the new kernel. That’s likely impossible. The stock software is heavily dependent on Flash which is a dead end. I’m just getting the new kernel running well enough so that I can develop my own custom software for it. I’m going to write a few posts about that process and some of the fun challenges I had to overcome. This first post in the series will talk about some of the work I did with U-Boot. If you’re into Linux kernel development, there’s massive number of devices out there running outdated kernels you could be updating for fun, in your spare time.
Around a year ago, I started working on emulating an iPod Touch 1G using the QEMU emulation software. After months of reverse engineering, figuring out the specifications of various hardware components, and countless debugging runs with GDB, I now have a functional emulation of an iPod Touch that includes display rendering and multitouch support. The emulated device runs the first firmware ever released by Apple for the iPod Touch: iPhoneOS 1.0, build 3A101a. The emulator runs iBoot (the bootloader), the XNU kernel and then executes Springboard. This is quite impressive.
Reports have indicated that Microsoft is planning to release a new Windows version every three years like it was in the times of Windows Vista and Windows 7. However, Microsoft doesn’t want Windows 11 to become boring or unexciting. Microsoft wants to keep Windows 11 constantly updated with “Moment” and some “feature” updates. Microsoft has reportedly scrapped the original Sun Valley 3 project and Windows 11 will receive Windows 11 23H2 based on the existing version 22H2, similar to enablement package updates for Windows 10. Microsoft wants to release a new Windows in 2024 (Windows 12? We don’t know yet). Version. Moment updates. Feature updates. Enablement package updates. 22H2 and 23H2. Cumulative updates. Main development channel. Windows 11 2022 Update. Windows 11 Build 25262. But sure, I am the idiot for not being able to keep track of this nomenclature diarrhea.
Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place. Unified Kernel Images have been championed by the systemd folks for better securing and trusting Linux distributions. Unified kernel images are a combination of the kernel image, initrd, and UEFI stub program all distributed as one. This seems like a fairly no-brainer move, and I’m sure there will be agreement and jolly cooperation on this step forward from all involved in the Linux community.
The Mac Pro is one of the few remaining Intel Macs with no Apple Silicon replacement ready to go, even though we’re a little past the two-year deadline that CEO Tim Cook originally set for the transition in summer 2020 (and to be fair, it has been a hard-to-predict couple of years). Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple continues to work on a new version of the Mac Pro, alongside other as-yet-unreplaced Intel Macs like the higher-end Mac mini and the 27-inch iMac, but that a planned “M2 Extreme” chip that would have powered the Apple Silicon Mac Pro has “likely” been canceled. Waiting for news in the face of uncertainty isn’t new to Mac Pro holdouts; it has been a constant for the last decade-plus. It has been a very long time since the Mac Pro was updated on anything close to a predictable cadence, especially if you don’t count partial refreshes like the 2012 Mac Pro tower or the addition of new GPU options to the 2019 model. And each of the last two updates—the “trash can” Mac Pro in 2013 and the reforged “cheese grater” version from 2019—have reflected a total shift in design and strategy. At this point, I’d like Apple to decide: either commit to a consistent strategy or vision for the Mac Pro and its place in the lineup or retire it. It sure has been a rough time for Mac Pro buyers. The reality of it is that desktop PCs – Apple or otherwise – just aren’t really all that popular anymore compared to laptops, and this probably doubly counts for the very high end. Selling Mac Pros by the thousands simply doesn’t make a whole lot of sense compared to the numbers Apple’s other computers are shipping at.
