A critical look at NetBSD’s installer 6 Jun 2025, 12:31 am

NetBSD is an OS that I installed only a couple of times over the years, so I’m not very familiar with its installer, sysinst. This fact was actually what led to this article (or the whole series rather): Talking to a NetBSD developer at EuroBSDcon 2023, I mentioned my impression that NetBSD was harder to install than it needed to be. He was interested in my perspective as a relative newcomer, and so I promised to take a closer look and write about it. While it certainly took me long enough, I finally get to do this. So let’s take a look at NetBSD’s installer, shall we? The version explored here is NetBSD 10.1 on amd64.

↫ Eerie Linux

An excellent deep, deep dive into the NetBSD installer. The two earlier installments cover FreeBSD’s and OpenBSD’s installers.

Redox gets X11 support, GTK3, and Mesa3D EGL 6 Jun 2025, 12:24 am

We’ve cleared another month by the skin of our teeth, so it’s time for another month of progress in Redox, the Rust-based operating system. They’ve got a big one for us this month, as Redox can now run X11 applications in its Orbital display server, working in much the same way as XWayland. This X11 support includes DRI, but it doesn’t yet fully support graphics acceleration. Related to the X11 effort is the brand new port of GTK3 and the arrival of Mesa3D EGL.

Moving on, there’s the usual massive list of bugfixes and low-level changes, such as the introduction of the /var directory and subdirectories for compliance with the FHS, a fix to make the live image work when there’s no other working storage driver, and a ton more. Of course, there’s the usual list of relibc fixes, as well as a ton of updated and improved ports.

New EU rules mandate five years of OS updates for smartphones and tablets 5 Jun 2025, 11:57 pm

Starting 20 June 2025, new rules and regulations in the European Union covering, among other thins, smartphones and tablets, will have some far-reaching consequences for device makers – consequences that, coincidentally, will work out pretty great for consumers within the European Union. The following “ecodesign requirements” will come into force on 20 June:

• resistance to accidental drops or scratches and protection from dust and water
• sufficiently durable batteries which can withstand at least 800 charge and discharge cycles while retaining at least 80% of their initial capacity
• rules on disassembly and repair, including obligations for producers to make critical spare parts available within 5-10 working days, and for 7 years after the end of sales of the product model on the EU market
• availability of operating system upgrades for longer periods (at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market of the last unit of a product model)
• non-discriminatory access for professional repairers to any software or firmware needed for the replacement

↫ European Commission

Especially the requirements around repairability and the long-term availability of operating system updates will affect us consumers quite positively. While Android OEMs have improved their update policies somewhat, they’re still lagging behind Apple considerably, especially if you opt for lower-end devices or devices from smaller manufacturers. These new requirements will make getting Android updates a consumer right, not an optional service if the OEM happens to feel like it. Which they usually don’t.

I’m sure countless OEMs will try to weasel their way through supposed cracks and gaps in the exact wording of the rules, but the EU has shown not to take too kindly to corporations, big and small, trying to comply maliciously.

“AI” coding chatbot funded by Microsoft were Actually Indians 4 Jun 2025, 1:56 am

London-based Builder.ai, once valued at $1.5 billion and backed by Microsoft and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, has filed for bankruptcy after reports that its “AI-powered” app development platform was actually operated by Indian engineers, said to be around 700 of them, pretending to be artificial intelligence.

The startup, which raised over $445 million from investors including Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority, promised to make software development “as easy as ordering pizza” through its AI assistant “Natasha.” However, as per the reports, the company’s technology was largely smoke and mirrors, human developers in India manually wrote code based on customer requests while the company marketed their work as AI-generated output.

↫ The Times of India

I hope those 700 engineers manage to get something out of this, but I doubt it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were unaware they were part of the “AI” scam.

To comply with the DMA, Microsoft rolls out tons of Windows improvements, but only for users in the EU 4 Jun 2025, 1:41 am

As part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to compliance with the Digital Markets Act, we are making the following changes to Windows 10, Windows 11, and Microsoft apps in the European Economic Area (EEA). We’ll update this post as these changes are shipped, first in Windows Insider builds and then in retail builds.

↫ Windows Insider Program Team

It’s time for more changes to make Windows suck just a little bit less, but only for those of us who live in the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway), courtesy of basic consumer protection laws like the Digital Markets Act. Windows users in other parts of the world will not get these changes, so if you don’t live in the EU/EEA, feel free to look away to remain blissfully ignorant.

In the EU/EEA, Edge will no longer bug you to be set as the default browser, unless you actually open Edge. In addition, other Microsoft applications won’t bug you to install Edge if you’ve removed it from your system. Setting a browser as default will now also register more filetypes. Whereas in other parts of the world setting, say, Firefox as your default browser in Windows will only register it as the default for http, https, .htm, and .html, it will register the following additional defaults: ftp, read, .mht, .mhtml, .shtml, .svg, .xht, .xhtml, and .xml.

Users in the EU/EEA can now also remove the Microsoft Store, without affecting updates or the ability for developers to the Microsoft Store Web Installer for their applications. You can now also have multiple online search providers in Windows Search, and countless Microsoft applications and Windows components will no longer default to opening Edge for web content, opting to use your default browser instead.

These are all very welcome improvements for European Windows users. It’s almost like consumer protection laws work.

Ice-T 2.8.0 released: a VT-100 terminal emulator for the Atari 8-bit 4 Jun 2025, 1:24 am

Ice-T is a terminal emulator, allowing Atari computers with extended memory (128KB or more) to connect to remote dialup and Telnet hosts, such as Unix shells and BBSs. A limited version for machines without extended memory is also available.

↫ Ice-T 2.8.0 release announcement

Version 2.8.0 was released a few days ago, the first new release in almost twelve years. It comes with a ton of improvements, such as VT-102 support, limited ANSI coloured text support, macros, and a lot more.

Fvwm3 1.1.3 released, completes transition from autotools to meson 3 Jun 2025, 10:53 pm

Fvwm3, the venerable, solid, configurable, no-nonsense window manager for X, has been updated: fvwm3 1.1.3 has been released. While the version number indicates that this is a minor release, there’s one reason why 1.1.3 is actually a much bigger deal than the version number suggests: it switches the build system from autotools to meson.

Fvwm is very old, and has been using autotools since 1996 (before then it was using handcrafted makefiles), but the release of autotools 2.70, which came eight years after the previous release, the amount of changes in autotools proved to be a major headache for fvwm. Since the amount of work would be considerable, the project decided to look at alternatives to autotools, and after considering CMake and meson, the latter was chosen.

This was chosen primary because X11 itself is transitioning its projects from autotools to meson. Additionally, there has been good help from the wider community around meson’s adoption.

In terms of “speed”, the parallelised nature of not using make does mean compilation speeds are improved, even on lower-end systems.

↫ Thomas Adam

To ensure you don’t need Python 3 just to build fvwm3, you can use muon starting with muon version 0.13. Muon is written in C, and only requires a C compiler to be built. Fvwm3’s transition from autotools to Meson started with version 1.1.1, and with 1.1.3 autotools has been completely deprecated. As for actual changes to fvwm3 itself, this point release is exactly what you’d expect – a few bug fixes, as well as some minor changes to FvwmRearrange.

Sony’s NEWS UNIX workstations 3 Jun 2025, 4:09 pm

The first prototype was ready in just six months. By October 1986, the project was announced, and in January 1987, the first NEWS workstation, the NWS 800 series, officially launched. It ran 4.2BSD UNIX and featured a Motorola 68020 CPU. Its performance rivaled that of traditional super minicomputers, but with a dramatically lower price point ranging from ¥950,000 to ¥2.75 million (approximately $6,555 to $18,975 USD in 1987). Competing UNIX workstations typically cost closer to ¥10 million (around $69,000 USD). NEWS caught on quickly in universities and R&D labs, where cost sensitive researchers needed real performance. The venture team had invested ¥400 million into development (about $2.76 million USD), and remarkably, they recouped those costs within just two months of launch.

That same year, Sony introduced a lower cost version called POP NEWS (PWS 1550). With a GUI shell named NEWS Desk, a document sharing format called CDFF (Common Document File Format), and a focus on Japanese language desktop publishing, PopNEWS aimed to make UNIX more accessible to general business users. Targeted at the Desktop Publishing market, it showed Sony’s desire to bridge consumer and professional segments in ways no other UNIX vendor was trying at the time.

↫ Obsolete Sony’s Newsletter

I’ve been fascinated by Sony’s NEWS workstations, and especially the NEWS-OS operating system, for a long time now. Real hardware is hard to find and prohibitively expensive, but some of these Sony NEWS workstations can be emulated through MAME. Sadly, as far as I can tell, you can only emulate NEWS-OS up to version 4.x, as I haven’t been able to find any information about emulating version 5.x and the final version, 6.x. If anyone knows anything about how to emulate these, if at all possible, please do share with the rest of us.

What’s interesting about Sony’s UNIX workstation efforts from the ’80s and ’90s is that they played an important role in the early development of the PlayStation. The early development kits for the PlayStation were modified NEWS workstations, with added PlayStation hardware. To further add to the importance of the NEWS line for gaming, Nintendo used them to develop several influential and popular first-party SNES titles, which isn’t surprising considering Nintendo and Sony originally worked together on bringing a CD-ROM drive to the SNES, which would later morph into the PlayStation as Nintendo cancelled the agreement at the last second.

That time “AI” translation almost caused a fight between a doctor and my parents 2 Jun 2025, 4:41 pm

What if you want to find out more about the PS/2 Model 280? You head out to Google, type it in as a query, and realise the little “AI” summary that’s above the fold is clearly wrong. Then you run the same query again, multiple times, and notice that each time, the “AI” overview gives a different wrong answer, with made-up details it’s pulling out of its metaphorical ass. Eventually, after endless tries, Google does stumble upon the right answer: there never was a PS/2 Model 280, and every time the “AI” pretended that there was, it made up the whole thing.

Google’s “AI” is making up a different type of computer out of thin air every time you ask it about the PS/2 Model 280, including entirely bonkers claims that it had a 286 with memory expandable up to 128MB of RAM (the 286 can’t have more than 16). Only about 1 in 10 times does the query yield the correct answer that there is no Model 280 at all.

An expert will immediately notice discrepancies in the hallucinated answers, and will follow for example the List of IBM PS/2 Models article on Wikipedia. Which will very quickly establish that there is no Model 280.

The (non-expert) users who would most benefit from an AI search summary will be the ones most likely misled by it.

How much would you value a research assistant who gives you a different answer every time you ask, and although sometimes the answer may be correct, the incorrect answers look, if anything, more “real” than the correct ones?

↫ Michal Necasek at the OS/2 Museum

This is only about a non-existent model of PS/2, which doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. However, what if someone is trying to find information about how to use a dangerous power tool? What if someone asks the Google “AI” about how to perform a certain home improvement procedure involving electricity? What if you try to repair your car following the instructions provided by “AI”? What if your mother follows the instructions listed in the leaflet that came with her new medication, which was “translated” using “AI”, and contains dangerous errors?

My father is currently undertaking a long diagnostic process to figure out what kind of age-related condition he has, which happens to involve a ton of tests and interviews by specialists. Since my parents are Dutch and moved to Sweden a few years ago, language is an issue, and as such, they rely on interpreters and my Swedish wife’s presence to overcome that barrier. A few months ago, though, they received the Swedish readout of an interview with a specialist, and pasted it into Google Translate to translate it to Dutch, since my wife and I were not available to translate it properly.

Reading through the translation, it all seemed perfectly fine; exactly the kind of fact-based, point-by-point readout doctors and medical specialists make to be shared with the patient, other involved specialists, and for future reference. However, somewhere halfway through, the translation suddenly said, completely out of nowhere: “The patient was combative and non-cooperative” (translated into English).

My parents, who can’t read Swedish and couldn’t double-check this, were obviously taken aback and very upset, since this weird interjection had absolutely no basis in reality. This readout covered a basic question-and-answer interview about symptoms, and at no point during the conversation with the friendly and kind doctor was there any strife or modicum of disagreement. Still, being into their ’70s and going through a complex and stressful diagnostic process in a foreign healthcare system, it’s not unsurprising my parents got upset.

When they shared this with the rest of our family, I immediately thought there must’ve been some sort of translation error introduced by Google Translate, because not only does the sentence in question not match my parents and the doctor in question at all, it would also be incredibly unprofessional. Even if the sentence were an accurate description of the patient-doctor interaction, it would never be shared with the patient in such a manner.

So, trying to calm everyone down by suggesting it was most likely a Google Translate error, I asked my parents to send me the source text so my wife and I could pour over it to discover where Google Translate went wrong, and if, perhaps, there was a spelling error in the source, or maybe some Swedish turn of phrase that could easily be misinterpreted even by a human translator. After pouring over the documents for a while, we came to a startling conclusion that was so, so much worse.

Google Translate made up the sentence out of thin air.

This wasn’t Google Translate taking a sentence and mangling it into something that didn’t make any sense. This wasn’t a spelling error that tripped up the numbskull “AI”. This wasn’t a case of a weird Swedish expression that requires a human translator to properly interpret and localise into Dutch. None of the usual Google Translate limitations were at play here. It just made up a very confrontational sentence out of thin air, and dumped it in between two other sentence that were properly present in the source text.

Now, I can only guess at what happened here, but my guess is that the preceding sentence in the source readout was very similar to a ton of other sentences in medical texts ingested by Google’s “AI”, and in some of the training material, that sentence was followed by some variation of “patient was combative and non-cooperative”. Since “AI” here is really just glorified autocomplete, it did exactly what autocomplete does: it made shit up that wasn’t there, thereby almost causing a major disagreement between a licensed medical professional and a patient.

Luckily for the medical professional and the patient in question, we caught it in time, and my family had a good laugh about it, but the next person this happens to might not be so lucky. Someone visiting a foreign country and getting medicine prescribed there after an incident might run instructions through Google Translate, only for Google to add a bunch of nonsense to the translation that causes the patient to misuse the medication – with potentially lethal consequences.

And you don’t even need to add “AI” translation into the mix, as the IBM PS/2 Model 280 queries show – Google’s “AI” is entirely capable of making shit up even without having to overcome a language barrier. People are going to trust what Google’s “AI” tells them above the fold, and it’s unquestionably going to lead to injury and most likely death.

And who will be held responsible?

GNOME OS ready for more extensive testing 2 Jun 2025, 4:39 pm

While it’s still early days and it’s not recommended for non-technical audiences, GNOME OS is now ready for developers and early adopters who know how to deal with occasional bugs (and importantly, file those bugs when they occur).

↫ Tobias Bernard

This is great news, and means GNOME OS is progressing nicely. I’m a proponent of this and KDE’s equivalent project, because it allows the people working on GNOME and KDE to really showcase their work in optimal, controlled conditions. While I don’t see myself switching to a Flatpak-based, immutable distribution because they tend to not align with what I want out of an operating system, they’ll serve as great showcases.

There is a risk associated with these projects, though, as I highlighted the last time we talked about them.

Once such “official” GNOME and KDE Linux distributions exist, the projects run a real risk of only really caring about how well GNOME and KDE work there, while not caring as much, or even at all, how well they run everywhere else. I’m not sure how they intend to prevent this from happening, but from here, I can already see the drama erupting. I hope this is something they take into consideration.

We’ll have to wait and see if my worries are founded or not.

Harpoom: of course the Apple Network Server can be hacked into running Doom 2 Jun 2025, 4:31 pm

Of course you can run Doom on a $10,000+ Apple server running IBM AIX. Of course you can. Well, you can now.

Now, let’s go ahead and get the grumbling out of the way. No, the ANS is not running Linux or NetBSD. No, this is not a backport of NCommander’s AIX Doom, because that runs on AIX 4.3. The Apple Network Server could run no version of AIX later than 4.1.5 and there are substantial technical differences. (As it happens, the very fact it won’t run on an ANS was what prompted me to embark on this port in the first place.) And no, this is not merely an exercise in flogging a geriatric compiler into building Doom Generic, though we’ll necessarily do that as part of the conversion. There’s no AIX sound driver for ANS audio, so this port is mute, but at the end we’ll have a Doom executable that runs well on the ANS console under CDE and has no other system prerequisites. We’ll even test it on one of IBM’s PowerPC AIX laptops as well. Because we should.

↫ Cameron Kaiser

Excellent reading, as always, from Cameron Kaiser.

“My experience with Canonical’s interview process” 2 Jun 2025, 4:29 pm

A short while ago, we talked about the hellish hiring process at a Silicon Valley startup, and today we’ve got another one. Apparently, it’s an open secret that the hiring process at Canonical is a complete dumpster fire.

I left Google in April 2024, and have thus been casually looking for a new job during 2024. A good friend of mine is currently working at Canonical, and he told me that it’s quite a nice company with a great working environment. Unfortunately, the internet is full of people who had a poor experience: Glassdoor shows that only 15% had a positive interview experience, famous internet denizens like sara rambled on the topic, reddit, hackernews, indeed and blind all say it’s terrible, … but the idea of being decently paid to do security work on a popular Linux distribution was really appealing to me.

↫ Julien Voisin

What follows is Byzantine and ridiculous, and all ultimately unnecessary since it turns out Mark Shuttleworth interviews applicants at the end of this horrid process and yays or nays people on vibes alone. You have to read it to believe it.

One interesting note that I do appreciate is that Voisin used their rights under the GDPR to force Canonical to hand over the feedback about his application since the GDPR considers it personal information. Delicious.

Flatpak “not being actively developed anymore” 31 May 2025, 8:26 am

At the Linux Application Summit (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that, by many metrics, Flatpak is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and more applications are being published in the Flathub application store, and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora. However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, and that there were too few developers able to review and merge code beyond basic maintenance.

↫ Joe Brockmeier at LWN

After reading this article and the long list of problems the Flatpak project is facing, I can’t really agree that “Flatpak is doing great”. Apparently, Flatpak is in maintenance mode, while major problems remain untouched, because nobody is working on the big-ticket items anymore. This seems like a big problem for a project that’s still facing a myriad of major issues.

For instance, Flatpak still uses PulseAudio instead of Pipewire, which means that if a Flatpak applications needs permission to play audio, it also automatically gets permission to use the microphone. NVIDIA drivers also pose a big problem, network namespacing in Flatpak is “kind of ugly”, you can’t specify backwards-compatible permissions, and tons more problems. There’s a lot of ideas and proposed solutions, but nobody to implement them, leaving Flatpak stagnated.

Now that Flatpak is adopted by quite a few popular desktop Linux distributions, it doesn’t seem particularly great that it’s having such issues with finding enough manpower to keep improving it. There’s a clear push, especially among developers of end-user focused applications, for everyone to use Flatpak, but is that push really a wise idea if the project has stagnated? Go into any thread where people discuss the use of Flatpaks, and there’s bound to be people experiencing problems, inevitably followed by suggested fixes to use third-party tools to break the already rather porous sandbox.

Flatpak feels like a project that’s far from done or feature-complete, causing normal, every-day users to experience countless problems and issues. Reading straight fromt he horse’s mouth that the project has stagnated and isn’t being actively developed anymore is incredibly worrying.

The Copilot delusion 31 May 2025, 8:02 am

And the “copilot” branding. A real copilot? That’s a peer. That’s a certified operator who can fly the bird if you pass out from bad taco bell. They train. They practice. They review checklists with you. GitHub Copilot is more like some guy who played Arma 3 for 200 hours and thinks he can land a 747. He read the manual once. In Mandarin. Backwards. And now he’s shouting over your shoulder, “Let me code that bit real quick, I saw it in a Slashdot comment!”

At that point, you’re not working with a copilot. You’re playing Russian roulette with a loaded dependency graph.

You want to be a real programmer? Use your head. Respect the machine. Or get out of the cockpit.

↫ Jj at Blogmobly

The world has no clue yet that we’re about to enter a period of incredible decline in software quality. “AI” is going to do more damage to this industry than ten Electron frameworks and 100 managers combined.

The flip phone web: browsing with the original Opera Mini 30 May 2025, 7:53 pm

Opera Mini was first released in 2005 as a web browser for mobile phones, with the ability to load full websites by sending most of the work to an external server. It was a massive hit, but it started to fade out of relevance once smartphones entered mainstream use.

Opera Mini still exists today as a web browser for iPhone and Android—it’s now just a tweaked version of the regular Opera mobile browser, and you shouldn’t use Opera browsers. However, the original Java ME-based version is still functional, and you can even use it on modern computers.

↫ Corbin Davenport

I remember using Opera Mini back in the day on my PocketPC and Palm devices. It wasn’t my main browser on those devices, but if some site I really needed was acting up, Opera Mini could be a lifesaver, but as we all remember, the mobile web before the arrival of the iPhone was a trashfire. Interestingly enough, we circled back to the mobile web being a trashfire, but at least we can block ads now to make it bearable.

Since Opera Mini is just a Java application, the client part of the equation will probably remain executable for a long time, but once Opera decides to close the server side of things, it will stop being useful. Perhaps one day someone will reverse-engineer the protocol and APIs, paving the way for a custom server we can all run as part of the retrocomputing hobby.

There’s always someone crazy and dedicated enough.

Apple said to switch to year to identify releases of its operating systems 28 May 2025, 11:38 pm

The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the current iOS 18 will give way to “iOS 26,” said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still private. Other updates will be known as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26.

Apple is making the change to bring consistency to its branding and move away from an approach that can be confusing to customers and developers. Today’s operating systems — including iOS 18, watchOS 12, macOS 15 and visionOS 2 — use different numbers because their initial versions didn’t debut at the same time.

↫ Mark Gurman at Bloomberg

OK.