Over on the GNU config-patches mailing list, Zack Weinberg is looking for help identifying a number of ancient operating systems and vendors.

These are probably all either vendor or OS names from the late 1980s or early 1990s. Can anyone help me fill out the following list of things that ought to appear in testsuite/config-sub.data, if I knew what to put in place of the question marks?

???-pc533 ???-pc533-???
???-sim ???-sim-???
???-ultra ???-ultra-???
???-unicom ???-unicom-???
???-acis ???-???-aos
???-triton ???-???-sysv3
???-oss ???-???-sysv3
???-storm-chaos ???-???-???

↫ Zack Weinberg

One of them has already been identified – “storm-chaos” turns out to have been added to binutils and/or maybe GCC in 2000, and after some digging around, John Marshall found what it’s referring to: chaos, a hobby operating system for x86 written in C. It has a long history, and after a period of inactivity came back in 2015 with a new website. Some new releases followed, with the last one being version 0.3.0 in 2019. It’s been silence since then.

The others are still up for grabs to be discovered. There is some talk that the pc533 one might be a misspelling of pc532, which would refer to the “NS32K-based PC532 board running NetBSD”. This is an incredibly obscure complete system built around the NS32532, of which only around 150 were built in the early ’90s. However, Weinberg is hesitant to accept this theory without more information, since there is already code to handle the pc532, and he wants to be sure before making any changes.

If there is one place on the internet outside of the GNU mailing lists that might be able to help Weinberg, it’s the OSNews audience. We have so many older people reading OSNews who have been working or otherwise active in this field for many decades, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these cryptic names make some bells ring for some of you. If one of you does e-mail a reply, be sure to mention this article – organic marketing to help keep us going!

Google is killing off a messaging service! This one is the odd “Google Business Messaging” service—basically an instant messaging client that is built into Google Maps. If you looked up a participating business in Google Maps or Google Search on a phone, the main row of buttons in the place card would read something like “Call,” “Chat,” “Directions,” and “Website.” That “Chat” button is the service we’re talking about. It would launch a full messaging interface inside the Google Maps app, and businesses were expected to use it for customer service purposes. Google’s deeply dysfunctional messaging strategy might lead people to joke about a theoretical “Google Maps Messaging” service, but it already exists and has existed for years, and now it’s being shut down.

↫ Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica

When it comes to Google, it’s often hard to distinguish meme from reality.

Speaking of The Verge, its parent company Vox Media, along with The Atlantic, have signed a deal with OpenAI.

Two more media companies have signed licensing agreements with OpenAI, allowing their content to be used to train its AI models and be shared inside of ChatGPT. The Atlantic and Vox Media — The Verge’s parent company — both announced deals with OpenAI on Wednesday.

↫ Emilia David at The Verge

In the case of Vox Media, the deal was made and announced without informing their staff, which obviously doesn’t sit well with especially Vox’ writers. By making deals like this, upper management gets to double-dip on the fruits of their workers’ labour – first, the published content generates ad revenues, and second, OpenAI pays them to use said content for training and other purposes.

And once the “AI” gets good enough, more and more of the writers will be fired, leaving only a skeleton crew of lower-paid workers to clean up the “AI” output. With this deal, the writing is on the wall for every journalist at Vox Media – you’re currently contributing to your own obsolescence, and your bosses are getting paid for it.

As far as I know, OSNews’ owner, David, has not yet been contacted by OpenAI. Regardless, I’ll sell the past 20-odd years of my terrible takes for 69 million euros, after deducting Swedish taxes. And since OpenAI is run by billionaires: taxes are this thing where normal people pay a portion of their income to the government in return for various government services.

It’s wild, I know.

iFixit is ending its collaboration with Samsung, as iFixit claims the Korean giant is not actually interested in offering repair options at all.

As we tried to build this ecosystem we consistently faced obstacles that made us doubt Samsung’s commitment to making repair more accessible. We couldn’t get parts to local repair shops at prices and quantities that made business sense. The part prices were so costly that many consumers opted to replace their devices rather than repair them. And the design of Samsung’s Galaxy devices remained frustratingly glued together, forcing us to sell batteries and screens in pre-glued bundles that increased the cost.

↫ Scott Head

Honestly, this doesn’t surprise me. Unless right to repair legislation becomes more widespread and stricter, corporations will inevitably drag their feet in honouring any right to repair commitments and promises they make.

It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve begun to dig deep into the inner workings of how terminal emulators, and the applications that run inside of them, really work. I’ve learned that there is a lot of innovation and creative problem solving happening in this space, even though the underlying technology is over half a century old.

I’ve also found that many people who use terminal based tools (including shells like Bash and editors like Vim) know very little about terminals themselves, or some of the modern features and capabilities they can support.

In this article, we’ll discuss some of the problems that terminal based applications have historically had to deal with (and what the modern solutions are) as well as some features that modern terminal emulators support that you may not be aware of.

↫ Gregory Anders

I don’t use the terminal much – usually just to update my systems – but on occasion I’ve had to really sit down and explore them more than usual, especially now that my workstation runs OpenBSD, and the depth and breadth of features, options, and clever tricks they possess is amazing. Over the past half century they’ve accumulated a lot of features along the way, and even though its unlikely to ever be for me, I can somewhat begin to appreciate why some people just tile a bunch of terminals on their screens and do all their computing that way.

I grew up with MS-DOS and Windows 3.x and later, so I’m just too attached to my mouse and pretty icons to switch to a terminal lifestyle, but over the years I’ve seen some pretty amazing terminal applications, from Mastodon clients to complex mail applications and web browsers, and you can be sure none of them steal your data or show you ads.

Maybe the terminal people are right after all.

After Broadcom acquired VMware, there’s been a steady stream of worrying or outright bad news for people using VMware products at home, for personal use, as enthusiasts. The biggest blow to the enthusiast market was the end of perpetual licensing, forcing people into subscriptions instead. Finally, though it seems we’re getting some good news.

The most exciting part is that Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro will now have two license models. We now provide a Free Personal Use or a Paid Commercial Use subscription for our Pro apps. Users will decide based on their use case whether a commercial subscription is required.

This means that everyday users who want a virtual lab on their Mac, Windows or Linux computer can do so for free simply by registering and downloading the bits from the new download portal located at support.broadcom.com.

↫ Michael Roy on the VMware blog

This is definitely good news for us enthusiasts, and it means I won’t have to buy a cheap VMware license off eBay every few years anymore, so I’m quite satisfied here. However, with VMware under Broadcom focusing more and more on the enterprise and squeezing every last penny out of those customers, one has to wonder if this ‘free for personal use’ is just a prelude to winding down the development of enthusiasts’ tools altogether.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a product going free for personal use was a harbinger of worse things yet to come.

Window management in Emacs gets a bad rap.

Some of this is deserved, but mostly this is a consequence of combining a very flexible and granular layout system with rather coarse controls. This leaves the door open to creating and using tools for handling windows that employ and provide better metaphors and affordances.

As someone who’s spent an unnecessary amount of time trying different approaches to window management in Emacs over the decades, I decided to summarize them here. Almanac might be overstating it a bit – this is a primer to and a collection of window management resources and tips.

↫ Karthik Chikmagalur

I honestly had no idea Emacs was this… Advanced, complex, and feature-laden. I mean, I thought Emacs’ complexity was just a meme, but reading this article it seems the memes don’t do it justice.

I want to run GoToSocial on some *BSD system. Because I am who I am, I went for using NetBSD 10.0 . And because my hypervisor is running bhyve on OmniOS , you get the title of this blog post.

Don’t get too anxious, it is quite straightforward. So let the journey begin.

↫ Joel Carnat

Bhyve is a hypervisor originating from FreeBSD, while OmniOS is a distribution of illumos, a continuation of the last open source Solaris release from Oracle. GoToSocial, meanwhile, is an ActivityPub social network server, so it belongs in the same family as Mastodon, Glitch, Akkoma, and countless others. This guide makes this whole process look like a piece of cake, so if you’ve ever been interested in running your own ActivityPub server – read on.

On a slightly related sidenote, there’s no OSNews AT instance, partly because I don’t want to deal with the moderation and costs, and partly because I’m incredibly happy being a member of Exquisite, a Glitch instance running on OpenBSD, managed by OpenBSD enthusiasts. Never say never, of course, but the odds of seeing an OSNews AT instance in the future are very slim.

There’s a new 9front release! So, what exactly is 9front, you may ask? Well, after it became clear that Bell Labs wasn’t doing much with plan9, a group of developers took matters into their own hands and created 9front, a fork of plan9. Their latest release is called DO NOT INSTALL, and brings things like more USB audio support, DNS over TLS, WiFi support for the Raspberry Pi, I2C support, and much more.

I’m not particularly well-versed in the world of plan9, and more often than not it feels like a form of high-level programming performance art that I’m just not smart enough to understand. The whole community and its associated web sites have a very unique feel to it, and I always feel like I’m just not cool enough to be part of it. That’s not a dig at the plan9 community – it’s more of an indictment of my lack of coolness.

Which really shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Cory Doctorow, nailing it as usual.

If you care about how people are treated by platforms, you can’t just tell them to pay for services instead of using ad-supported media. The most important factor in getting decent treatment out of a tech company isn’t whether you pay with cash instead of attention – it’s whether you’re locked in, and thus a flight risk whom the platform must cater to.

↫ Cory Doctorow

I’m sick and tired of the phrase “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product”, because it implies that if just you pay for a product or service, you’re not going to be treated like ass. The problem is, as Doctorow points out, that this simply is not supported by the evidence, and that it isn’t whether or not you’re paying that makes you have a good or bad experience – it’s whether or not you’re locked in.

If you’ve got nowhere else to go, then corporations can treat you like ass.

There are so, so many free services and products I use where I’m anything but a “product”. My Linux distribution of choice, Fedora. My web browser, Firefox. The countless open source applications I use on my desktops, laptops, and smartphone. Those are all cases where even though I’m not paying, I know I’m being treated with respect, and I feel entirely comfortable with all of those. And no, you don’t get to exclude the open source world just because it’s inconvenient for the “you’re the product” argument.

There are also countless services and products where the opposite is true; I’m a paying customer, but I still feel like I’m the product. I pay for additional Google Drive storage. I pay for an Office 364 subscription because I needed it as a translator (I’m working on OSNews full-time now, and could use your help keeping the site going), but I can’t cancel it because my wife, my parents, and my parents-in-law use that same subscription. We pay for Netflix and one or two other video services. I don’t know if our ISP or wireless provider do anything malicious, but it wouldn’t surprise me. And so on.

Being a paying customer means nothing. It’s how easy it is for you to stop being a customer that matters.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan this week publicized some concessions aimed at helping customers and partners ease into VMware’s recent business model changes. Tan reiterated that the controversial changes, like the end of perpetual licensing, aren’t going away. But amid questioning from antitrust officials in the European Union (EU), Tan announced that the company has already given support extensions for some VMware perpetual license holders.

↫ Scharon Harding at Ars Technica

I’m linking to the Ars Technica writeup here, because the original blog post from Broadcom’s CEO is effectively unreadable to me, as steeped in corpospeak as it is. The basic gist is that the storm of criticism that’s been hovering around Broadcom ever since the changes it announced to VMware’s licensing strategy isn’t going away, and even attracted the attention of the European Union. As such, Broadcom is giving existing perpetual VMware license holders some breathing room, but not much, and their plans will be executed as-is regardless.

I doubt Broadcom and VMware are big and crucial enough for the full might of the EU to come down on them, so I don’t think we’ll see any sudden turnarounds like we did with Apple and Facebook, for instance, but at least some cracks are clearly starting to show. If the aforementioned storm keeps up, pressure from customers might actually force more concessions out of Broadcom.

Proton is Firefox’s new design, starting from Firefox 89. Photon is the old design of Firefox which was used until version 88.

Proton’s overall feel is good, but there were a few things I didn’t like and wanted to improve.
That’s why this project was born, and Lepton to denote light theme layer.

Lepton’s photon styled is preserve Photon’s feeling while keep Original Lepton’s strengths.

↫ Firefox UI Fix GitHub page

I do not like the current Firefox user interface, because even with the ‘compact’ layout re-enabled in about:config, I find it just too bulky and wasteful of my screen real estate. I’ve been using the above Firefox user interface mod for ages now, and I can’t imagine using Firefox without it. The GitHub pages and guides are a bit of a mess and difficult to follow due to the project consisting of several overlapping different styles, but I just use the script listed here, selecting the style “2” when running the script.

It won’t be for everyone, but for me, it makes Firefox nice and compact, turning it into a mouse-first interface without trying to accommodate touch. This is also by far not the only project with this goal, so if you’re using something else – feel free to list them.

VMS Software, the company developing OpenVMS, has announced some considerable changes to its licensing program for hobbyists, and the news is, well, bad. The company claims that demand for hobbyist licenses has been so high that they were unable to process requests fast enough, and as such, that the program is not delivering the “intended benefits”. Despite this apparent high demand, contributions from the community, such as writing and porting open-source software, creating wiki articles, and providing assistance on their forums, “has not matched the scale of the program”.

Now, I want to stop them right here. The OpenVMS hobbyist program was riddled with roadblocks, restrictions, unclear instructions, restrictive licensing, and similar barriers to entry. As such, it’s entirely unsurprising that the community around a largely relic of an operating system – with all due respect – simply hasn’t grown enough to become self-sustainable. The blame here lies entirely with VMS Software itself, and not at all with whatever community managed to form around OpenVMS, despite the countless restrictions.

So, you’d expect them to expand the program, right? Perhaps embrace open source, or make the various versions and releases more freely and easily available?

No, they’re going to do the exact opposite. To address not getting enough out of their community, they’re going to limit that community’s options even more. First, they’re ending the community program for the Alpha and Itanium (which they call Integrity, since it covers HP’s Integrity machines), effective immediately, so they won’t be granting any new licenses for these architectures. Existing licenses will continue to work until 2025.

Effective immediately, we will discontinue offering new community licenses for non-commercial use for Alpha and Integrity. Existing holders of community licenses for these architectures will get updates for those licenses and retain their access to the Service Portal until March 2025 for Alpha and December 2025 for Integrity. All outstanding requests for Alpha and Integrity community licenses will be declined.

↫ VMS Software announcement

This sucks, but with both Alpha and Itanium being end-of-life, there’s at least some arguments that can be made for ending the program for these architectures. Much less defensible are the changes to x86-64 community licensing, which basically just come down to more bureaucracy for both users and VMS Software.

For x86 community licenses, we will be transitioning to a package-based distribution model (which will also replace the student license that used to be distributed as a FreeAXP emulator package). A vmdk of a system disk with OpenVMS V9.2-2 and compilers installed and licensed will be provided, along with instructions to create a virtual machine and the SYSTEM password. The license installed on that system will be valid for one year, at which point we will provide a new package. While this may entail some inconvenience for users, it enables us to continue offering licenses at no cost, ensuring accessibility without compromising our sustainability.

↫ VMS Software announcement

The vibe I’m getting from this announcement is that by offering some rudimentary and complicated form of community licensing, OpenVMS hoped to gain the advantages of a vibrant open source community, without all the downsides. They must’ve hoped that by throwing the community a bone, they’d get them to do a bunch of work for them, and now that this is not panning out, they’re taking their ball and going home. That’s entirely within their right, of course, but I doubt these changes are going to make anyone more excited to dig into OpenVMS.

All of this feels eerily similar to the attempts by QNX – before being acquired by BlackBerry – to do pretty much the same thing. QNX also tried a similar model where you needed to sign up and jump through a bunch of hoops to get QNX releases, and the company steeped it in talks of building a community, but of course it didn’t pan out because people are simply not interested in a one-way relationship where you’re working for free for a corporation who then takes your stuff and uses it to sell their, in this case, operating system.

This particular mistake is made time and time again, and it seems VMS Software simply did not learn this lesson.

DwarFS is a read-only file system with a focus on achieving very high compression ratios in particular for very redundant data.

[…]

DwarFS also doesn’t compromise on speed and for my use cases I’ve found it to be on par with or perform better than SquashFS. For my primary use case, DwarFS compression is an order of magnitude better than SquashFS compression, it’s 6 times faster to build the file system, it’s typically faster to access files on DwarFS and it uses less CPU resources.

↫ DwarfFS GitHub page

DwarfFS supports both Linux, macOS, and Windows, but macOS and Windows support is experimental at this point. It seems to have higher compression ratios at faster speeds than various alternatives, so if you have a use case for compression file systems – give DwarfFS a look.

Hurd, the kernel that is supposed to form the basis of the GNU operating system, is perpetually a research project that doesn’t get anywhere close to being a replacement for Linux, but that doesn’t mean the project doesn’t make progress and has a place in the world of operating systems. Their most recent major improvement has been porting GNU Hurd to AArch64, spearheaded by Hurd developer Sergey Bugaev.

Since then, however, I have been (some may say, relentlessly) working on filling in the missing piece, namely porting GNU Mach (with important help & contributions by Luca D.). I am happy to report that we now have an experimental port of GNU Mach that builds and works on AArch64! While that may sound impressive, note that various things about it are in an extremely basic, proof-of-concept state rather than being seriously production-ready; and also that Mach is a small kernel (indeed, a microkernel), and it was designed from the start (back in the 80s) to be portable, so most of the “buisness logic” functionality (virtual memory, IPC, tasks/threads/scheduler) is explicitly arch-independent.

Despite the scary “WIP proof-of-concept” status, there is enough functionality in Mach to run userland code, handle exceptions and syscalls, interact with the MMU to implement all the expected virtual memory semantics, schedule/switch tasks and threads, and so on. Moreover, all of GNU Mach’s userspace self-tests pass!

↫ Sergey Bugaev

On top of all this, glibc works on the AArch64 port, and several important Hurd servers work as well, namely ext2fs, exec, startup, auth, and proc, as a do a number of basic UNIX programs. This is an exceptional effort, and highlights that while people tend to make fun of Hurd, it’s got some real talent working on it that bring the platform forward. While we may not see any widely usable release any time soon, every bit of progress helps and is welcome.

Speaking of progress, the progress report for GNU Hurd covering the first quarter of 2024 has also been published, and it lists a number of other improvements and fixes made aside from the AArch64 port. For instance, the console will now use xkbcommon instead of X11 for handling keyboard layouts, which reduced code complexity a lot and improved keyboard layout coverage, to boot. The port of GDB to the 64 bit version of Hurd is also progressing, and SMP has seen a ton of fixes too.

Another awesome bit of news comes from, once again, Sergey Bugaev, as he announced a new Hurd distribution based on Alpine Linux. Work on this project has only recently begun, but he’s already had some success and about 299 Alpine packages are available. His reasons for starting this new project is that while Debian GNU/Hurd is a great base to work from for Hurd users and developers, Debian is also a bit strict and arcane in its packaging requirements, which might make sense for Debian GNU/Linux, but is annoying to work with when you’re trying to get a lot of low-level work done. For now, there’s no name yet, and he’s asking for help from the Hurd community for name ideas, hosting, and so on.

That’s a lot of GNU Hurd progress this quarter, and that’s good news.

It was Stability’s armada of GPUs, the wildly powerful and equally expensive chips undergirding AI, that were so taxing the company’s finances. Hosted by AWS, they had long been one of Mostaque’s bragging points; he often touted them as one of the world’s 10 largest supercomputers. They were responsible for helping Stability’s researchers build and maintain one of the top AI image generators, as well as break important new ground on generative audio, video and 3D models. “Undeniably, Stability has continued to ship a lot of models,” said one former employee. “They may not have profited off of it, but the broader ecosystem benefitted in a huge, huge way.”

But the costs associated with so much compute were now threatening to sink the company. According to an internal October financial forecast seen by Forbes, Stability was on track to spend $99 million on compute in 2023. It noted as well that Stability was “underpaying AWS bills for July (by $1M)” and “not planning to pay AWS at the end of October for August usage ($7M).” Then there were the September and October bills, plus $1 million owed to Google Cloud and $600,000 to GPU cloud data center CoreWeave. (Amazon, Google and CoreWeave declined to comment.)

↫ Kenrick Cai and Iain Martin

As a Dutch person, I can smell a popping bubble from a mile away, even if tulipmania is most likely anti-Dutch British propaganda.

In all seriousness, there’s definitely signs that the insane energy and compute costs of artificial image and video generation in particular are rising at such an insane pace it’s simply unsustainable for the popularity of these tools to just keep rising. Eventually someone’s going to have to pay, and I wonder just how much regular people are willing to pay for this kind of stuff.