Monthly Archive:: February 2021
Google is exploring an alternative to Apple Inc.’s new anti-tracking feature, the latest sign that the internet industry is slowly embracing user privacy, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Internally, the search giant is discussing how it can limit data collection and cross-app tracking on the Android operating system in a way that is less stringent than Apple’s solution, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private plans. Of course it’s going to be less stringent than Apple’s solution. Can’t limited ad tracking too much if ad tracking is how you make money.
The key difference between regular Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core is the underlying architecture of the system. Traditional Linux distributions rely mostly on traditional package systems—deb, in Ubuntu’s case—while Ubuntu Core relies almost entirely on Canonical’s relatively new snap package format. Ubuntu Core also gets a full 10 years of support from Canonical rather than the five years traditional Ubuntu LTS releases get. But it’s a bit more difficult to get started with, since you need an Ubuntu SSO account to even log in to a new Ubuntu Core installation in the first place. Ars takes a look at this rather unusual Ubuntu variant.
Here we go. Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet, and maybe never will. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to “just work” without the need for adjustments, then you may be better of not using Wayland at this point. Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks only seem to care about Gnome, and alienating everyone else in the process. DO NOT INSTALL WAYLAND! Let Wayland not destroy everything and then have other people fix the damage it caused. Or force more Red Hat/Gnome components (glib, Portals, Pipewire) on everyone! I’ll save you a read and summarise the ‘article’ so you can do something more productive, like I don’t know, cleaning your floors with a toothpick or something: “my tools and components written specifically for X and its APIs do not work under Wayland, therefore Wayland is garbage and shit”. Wayland is not X.org. Let me repeat that. Wayland is not X.org. If you need the functionality that X.org delivers, then you shouldn’t be using Wayland. This is like buying a Mac and complaining your Windows applications don’t work.
Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which allows users to mix-and-match components from other, typically incompatible distributions. Bedrock integrates these components into one largely cohesive system. You think you’ve seen everything the Linux world has to offer and nothing can you surprise you anymore, and then you run into something like this. I wonder how well this works if a Bedrock Linux installation holds up over time.
Remember HarmonyOS, the operating system Huawei claimed it had written from the ground-up? Yeah it’s just Android 10. After getting access to HarmonyOS through a grossly invasive sign-up process, firing up the SDK and emulator, and poring over the developer documents, I can’t come to any other conclusion: HarmonyOS is essentially an Android fork. The way that Huawei describes the OS to the press and in developer documents doesn’t seem to have much to do with what the company is actually shipping. The developer documents appear almost purposefully written to confuse the reader; any bit of actual shipping code to which you hold up a magnifying glass looks like Android with no major changes. The phrase “fake it till you make it” is often given as motivational advice, but I’ve never seen it applied to OS development before. If you’ve ever seen a modern Huawei Android phone, HarmonyOS is largely the same thing… with a few strings changed. So while there’s not much new to see, we can at least dissect HarmonyOS and debunk some of Huawei’s claims about its “brand-new” operating system. So nothing new under the sun here.
The first step in my crazy experiment to see if you can turn a Sun SPARC server into a workstation has been completed. Thanks to an incredibly generous donation by Jon Rushton, a reader from the UK, I’m now in possession of a SunFire V245 server (I did pay for shipping, of course). The machine has some serious specifications: Two UltraSPARC IIIi 1.5Ghz processors 8 GB of DDR1 RAM Two SAS hard drives (73GB and 140GB) Sun Raptor GFX graphics card (to be replaced by a Sun Quadro FX 3450) The machine has plenty of room for expansion, as well as the usual server features like dual power supplies, lots and lots of fans that no doubt will be incredibly loud, hot-swappable drive bays, remote management ports, and so on. Since I’m still waiting on a few more accessories I needed to purchase in order to setup and use the server – a USB serial console cable and the aforementioned more powerful GPU – I can’t turn it on and use it quite yet. While we wait on those accessories to be delivered, I figured I might as well post a story in the meantime with a bunch of photos of the server. I have a lot of learning to do here, since the server world is not a place I have ever really visited. I’m going to make stumbles along the way, but the end goal is for this server to be a usable workstation – most likely running either Linux or BSD. I can’t wait to get started.
The macOS Big Sur 11.2 kernel (XNU) source has been released here: source, tarball. My previous post on building XNU for macOS 11.0.1 described the method for compiling open source XNU for Intel Macs. This post details how to compile XNU for both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, and how to boot the custom kernel on both platforms. Note that it is not possible to build or boot a custom XNU on Apple Silicon Macs before macOS 11.2. I doubt many people compile and run their own XNU kernels, but the fact that you can is still cool.
A group of enthusiasts are proposing a new set of graphics instructions designed for 3D graphics and media processing. These new instructions are built on the RISC-V base vector instruction set. They will add support for new data types that are graphics specific as layered extensions in the spirit of the core RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). Vectors, transcendental math, pixel, and textures and Z/Frame buffer operations are supported. It can be a fused CPU-GPU ISA. The group is calling it the RV64X as instructions will be 64-bit long (32 bits will not be enough to support a robust ISA). There’s a lot of activity around RISC-V, and with it being open and freely usable, a lot of – at first – cheaper, embedded uses will be taken over by RISC-V, hopefully followed by more performant use cases in the near future.
