After 25+ years of helping people use and experience the web, Internet Explorer (IE) is officially retired and out of support as of today, June 15, 2022. To many millions of you, thank you for using Internet Explorer as your gateway to the internet. You hear that? That’s the cries of thousands of enterprise software engineers finally realising their garbage enterprise software doesn’t work anymore.
This new version brings many improvements: the accent colour can now be set based on the prominent colour from the current desktop background image (it updates if you use slide-show wallpapers) and it applies to more graphical elements. The global theme settings page lets you pick and choose which parts to apply, and floating panels add a margin all around the panel to make it float while no window is maximised. Touchscreen mode can now be activated by detaching the screen, rotating it 360, or enabling it manually. The overview effect can be activated by gestures on a touchpad or touchscreen, using the same smooth Wayland gestures GNOME has implemented as well. The application page for Discover has been redesigned and gives you links to the application’s documentation and website, and shows what system resources it has access to. Panels can now be navigated with the keyboard, and you can assign custom shortcuts to focus individual panels. And much, much more.
After our last story about porting Doom to weird versions of UNIX, I suggested porting Doom to Xenix should be the next challenge. Well, as cb88 pointed out – it’s already been done, and even improved upon. I should have known.
Yesterday, Microsoft released Windows 11 build 22621 to Windows Insiders enrolled in the Release Preview Channel, marking another step towards general availability of Windows 11 22H2 which is scheduled for release sometime later this year. However, it seems from reports on Reddit, that users on unsupported hardware are being offered the upgrade as well, even those on Windows 10. The wrong bit was flipped.
This site is a comprehensive resource for a variety of upgrades to the Apple PowerMac 6100 and related machines. Contrary to popular press and opinion, the PowerMac 6100 is a very expandable and upgradeable machine! From its humble beginnings as a “beginner’s” Performa, my venerable PowerMac is now a G3-powered, multimedia authoring workhorse machine with all manner of options, input devices, peripherals and cross-platform capabilities. It took a little elbow grease and a lot of reading, but now that the leg work has been done, it’s really quite easy! An extraordinary time capsule from 2000. These upgradeable Macs are some of the most interesting Macs Apple ever released, and I have a soft spot for the various rare and hard-to-find G3 and G4 processor upgrade cards – which is why Action Retro is one of my personal heroes.
I have this issue where Windows is sometimes randomly changing my primary display after a system restart. So I wanted to create a simple command-line application that would allow me to change the display settings on system startup – should be easy, right? Narrator: it wasn’t easy.
Hopefully there’s a new ISO/img on the mirrors for DragonFly 6.2.2 by the time you read this – or you can just update your installation. The changelog is short, because this is a bugfix-level release. Also, don’t forget there’s a new set of binary packages out; update that too if you haven’t. Clear as day.
Released a year before its main competitor, the Xbox 360 was already claiming technological superiority against the yet-to-be-seen Playstation 3. But while the Xbox 360 might be the flagship of the 7th generation, it will need to fight strongly once Nintendo and Sony take up retail space. This new entry of the console architecture series will give you an additional perspective of how technology was envisioned during the early naughties, with emphasis on the emerging ‘multi-core’ processor and unorthodox symbiosis between components, all of which enabled engineers to tackle unsolvable challenges with cost-effective solutions. As with the other entries into the series, this is great weekend reading. Incredibly detailed, covering both hardware and software, the games, the development tools, and so much more. Excellent work.
This is a small write-up about installing OpenBSD 7.1 on a PINE64 RockPro64 SBC. RockPro64 is a beefy single-board computer made by a company that brought us awesome devices like Pinebook Pro (laptop), Pinecil (soldering iron), PineTime (smartwatch) and of course PinePhone. The board utilizes the same hexa-core processor as Pinebook Pro – Rockchip RK3399, and 4 gigabytes of LPDDR4 RAM. One of the distinct features of that computer is a PCI-express X4 socket. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use any video card there even with “stock” GNU/Linux – ARM64 GPU drivers for AMD/NVIDIA is just not there yet I assume. The slot is often being used for a network cards and SATA controllers – there is even an official case for RP64 with 3.5″ hard drives spots inside, quite handy for a homemade NAS or something of sorts. Exactly what it says on the tin.
It seems NCommander’s horrid journey porting Doom to AIX is inspiring others to the same. This time around, Cariad Keigher ported Doom to a more obscure UNIX variant – Apple’s A/UX. I’ve never considered porting Doom before, but I was curious if my favourite abandoned UNIX variant had a port. With some very brief cursory searches on Google and GitHub, I was led to believe that this was unlikely or if it had been done, it was never publicly announced a port or it has been lost to the sands of time. If it is the case nobody has bothered, there is a good reason: it isn’t exactly necessary. Once I explain A/UX, it’ll make sense why I am likely the first person ever to port the game to this platform. All I can say is – godspeed to people like NCommander and Keigher. This sort of hackery makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, even if I don’t always understand all the details of the programming work they’re doing. I wonder who will pick up the baton and what obscure UNIX will get a Doom port next. May I make a suggestion?
The latest Haiku activity report has been published, and this one is heavy on the driver work. The intel_extreme driver has received quite a bit of love, and Haiku now has an RNDIS USB ethernet driover, which Android uses to share its WiFi connection, so you can now use an Android phone’s hotspot to get Haiku online (only a few devices have been tested so far, though. Another big improvement is the overhauled MTU. waddlesplash overhauled MTU (“maximum transmission unit”) and also receive size handling in the network stack and the FreeBSD compatibility layer. Previously, we always stayed at the default ethernet MTU of 1500, which was fine but suboptimal (as ethernet can usually support jumbo frames up to size 9000 or so), but more problematic was that we could not handle receiving anything larger than this, as it would trigger errors in the ethernet handler related to scattered I/O operations. This required a number of changes: first to the stack itself and to the IPv4 & IPv6 handlers to check the correct MTU value, then to the ethernet module to use larger buffers if necessary when reading or writing data, and finally to the FreeBSD compatibility layer to activate the larger MTUs. These changes had a side effect of fixing “high packet loss” on some devices (or at least PulkoMandy’s very recent Intel ethernet device, anyway.) This is just a small selection – there’s tons more, such as further improvements to the ARM and RISC-V ports, the addition of the OpenBSD WiFi stack to further widen Haiku’s WiFi driver pool, and tons more.
Variable rate refresh (VRR / FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync) support for GNOME’s Mutter compositor is closer to being merged. The native back-end support for VRR that has been in development the past two years is no longer considered a work-in-progress and it’s believed there are no longer any blocking issues that would prevent this code from landing. Every modern compositor should support this.
The European Union (EU) has reached an agreement that will make USB-C charging no longer just a convenience but a requirement for iPhones and all other mobile phones by the fall of 2024. The plan extends to additional consumer electronics using wired charging, including digital cameras, tablets, and, at a later date, laptops. Today’s announcement shows the EU Parliament and Council agreeing to terms for universal USB-C charging, something the parliament has spent 10 years arguing for. In September, the European Commission announced its intent to enact legislation requiring USB-C charging. The next step will be for the EU Parliament and Council to formally approve the agreement. A long time coming, but now it’s finally happening.
With macOS 13, Apple has announced that Apple Silicon systems running ARM Linux virtual machines will now be able to access Rosetta for translating of x86_64 Linux binaries… In other words, great Linux x86_64 support when running within Linux (Arm-based) VMs. This is a neat addition.
The OS/2 Museum has made available the first version of a display driver disk for Windows 9x running on VirtualBox. The driver uses a linear framebuffer and supports 8/16/24/32bpp modes with resolutions up to 1920×1200 pixels. The driver is not accelerated but tends to be very speedy on modern hardware. I cannot wait to try this out. The linked article also includes a few notes about the development of the driver in question – it won’t come as a surprise that this wasn’t an easy process.
macOS wasn’t the only platform in Apple’s spotlight today, of course. First, iOS 16 comes with an entirely new lock screen, moving notifications from the top to the bottom of the screen, and adding tons of customisability. Craig Federighi says that iOS 16 includes “the biggest update ever to the lock screen, completely reimagining how it looks and how it works for you.” You can add widgets to the lock screen, adjust the depth of field with your background image, and much more. The iMessage application, a messaging service popular in the United States, has also received many new features, many of which were long-awaited by its users. Most notably, iOS 16 introduces the ability to edit or unsend recently sent iMessages, as well as mark iMessage conversations as unread after opening them. These features will bring iMessage more in line with third-party messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram. A very important and welcome new feature is Safety Check, which is designed specifically for people in abuse relationships. It’s of course sad that features like this are needed, but I’m glad this may make the process of escaping an abusive relationship just a little bit easier for victims. A new privacy tool called Safety Check can be helpful to users whose personal safety is at risk from domestic or intimate partner violence by quickly removing all access they’ve granted to others. It includes an emergency reset that helps users easily sign out of iCloud on all their other devices, reset privacy permissions, and limit messaging to just the device in their hand. It also helps users understand and manage which people and apps they’ve given access to. Apple also unveiled new versions of iPadOS and watchOS, with the iPad getting access to the same Stage Manager feature as macOS for easier multitasking.
As expected, Apple has used the stage at its WWDC 2022 keynote to reveal the features and changes coming to macOS in the next major software update for the platform, macOS 13 Ventura. Ventura’s headlining feature is a new multitasking interface called Stage Manager. It’s being billed as a way to fight window clutter on a busy desktop—enter Stage Manager mode, and one of your windows floats to the center of the screen, pushing your other windows into a compressed navigation column on the left of the screen. Click a different app window on the left, and it will fly to the center of the screen, knocking the app you were using before into the navigation column. I’m not entirely sure if adding a second dock to the Mac is going to be a pleasant experience, but I at least like the throwback to a very deep cut – looks-wise, this reminded me a lot of Sun’s Project Looking Glass, a weird, fully 3D *NIX desktop environment with flippable and rotatable windows built in Java. Then again, Apple’s Expose is still one of the best window management features of the past two decades, so after some use this new Stage Manager feature might be of the same pedigree.
From MacRumors: Apple today announced the M2 chip, the second-generation Apple silicon chip for the Mac, offering improved efficiency and performance, as well as support for up to 24GB of memory. M2 is built using second-generation 5nm technology with 20 billion transistors, 25 percent more than the M1 chip. M2 features a 18 percent faster CPU, a 35 percent more powerful GPU, and a 40 percent faster Neural Engine compared to the M1 chip. The M2 supports up to 24GB of LPDDR5 unified memory and features four performance and four efficiency cores. The chip supports 100GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, up 50 percent from the M1. We’ll have to wait for the independent benchmarks, but considering the M1 still runs circles around the competition – especially in the laptop space – I think it’s safe to say the M2 will be running those same circles at least a little bit faster. The M2 can be found in the brand new MacBook Air, which Apple also announced today.
webOSArchive (WOSA) is the unofficial repository of information, restoration efforts, and archives for Palm/HP’s mobile webOS operating system. This site does not provide material or information about the spin-off operating systems, webOS Open Source Edition (wOSE) or LG’s webOS for TVs. It’s the position of the curator, and the remaining webOS community, that Palm and HP’s webOS devices, including the Pre series phones, the Veer and Pixi phones, and the TouchPad, remain useful devices that both provide value to their users and education to the rest of the industry. In fact, many webOS innovations have been copied by modern mobile OS developers. You can follow the ongoing efforts to restore and retain the usefulness of the platform here, or join the community and participate! This includes the entire application catalog, SDK, developer information, documentation, and a lot more. Impressive effort, and a great resource for people still using and/or playing with their webOS devices.
If you have a 2013- or 2014-era iPad sitting around unused because it’s not getting updates from Apple anymore and has stopped running the apps you need, some developers are working on an alternative software solution for you. Developer Konrad Dybcio and a Linux enthusiast going by “quaack723” have collaborated to get Linux kernel version 5.18 booting on an old iPad Air 2, a major feat for a device that was designed to never run any operating system other than Apple’s. This is an amazing achievement, and further goes to show that given enough time, someone will port Linux to it.
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