Category Archives: News

Source: OSNews

With X.org being in maintenance mode, with the process of replacing it with Wayland accelerating pretty quickly now, a lot of projects using X.org are looking for ways to prepare for the future. Alpine Linux, a distribution focused on musl, BusyBox, and OpenRC, also wants to reduce its maintenance burden for X11 applications, and so Alpine Linux maintainer Ariadne Conill has come up with something interesting.

Wayback is an experimental X compatibility layer which allows for running full X desktop environments using Wayland components. It is essentially a stub compositor which provides just enough Wayland capabilities to host a rootful Xwayland server.

It is intended to eventually replace the classic X.org server in Alpine, thus reducing maintenance burden of X applications in Alpine, but a lot of work needs to be done first.

↫ Wayback GitHub page

It’s nowhere near done and most likely contains massive amounts of bugs and issues, but the seed has been planted. Wayback will make it possible to keep running X11-based desktop environments even in a full-Wayland environment. This may be necessary in case you need a specific feature not yet available in the Wayland version of your desktop environment, or if your desktop environment of choice simply isn’t going to move to Wayland at all (due to lack of maintainers or whatever).

It’ll also be a boon for retrocomputing, especially as over the coming years and decades unmaintained X11 desktop environments become become ever harder to keep running on modern Linux distributions. While X.org as it exists today certainly isn’t going anywhere any time soon, it will, eventually, stop working properly on Linux distributions who don’t ship it by default anymore, and it’s awesome to already have the beginnings of a project to address this problem.

Source: OSNews

The GPU in your computer is about 10 to 100 times more powerful than the CPU, depending on workload. For real-time graphics rendering and machine learning, you are enjoying that power, and doing those workloads on a CPU is not viable. Why aren’t we exploiting that power for other workloads? What prevents a GPU from being a more general purpose computer?

↫ Raph Levien

Fascinating thoughts on parallel computation, including some mentions of earlier projects like Intel’s Larabee or the Connection Machine with 64k processors the ’80s, as well as a defense of the PlayStation 3’s Cell architecture.

Source: Hacker News

Source: OSNews

It’s been nearly a year since a faulty CrowdStrike update took down 8.5 million Windows-based machines around the world, and Microsoft wants to ensure such a problem never happens again. After holding a summit with security vendors last year, Microsoft is poised to release a private preview of Windows changes that will move antivirus (AV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) apps out of the Windows kernel.

↫ Tom Warren at The Verge

After the CrowdStrike incident, one of the first things Microsoft hinted as was moving antivirus and EDR applications out of the kernel, building an entirely new framework for these applications instead. The company has been working together with several large security vendors on these new frameworks and APIs, and it’s now finally ready to show off this new work to the outside world. Instead of designing the new frameworks and APIs in-house and just dumping them on the security vendors, Microsoft requested the security vendors send them detailed documentation on how they want the new frameworks and APIs to work.

This first preview of the new implementation will be private, and will allow security vendors to request changes and additional features. Microsoft states it will take a few iterations before it’s ready for general availability, and on top of that, security software is only the first focus of this new effort. It turns out Microsoft wants to move more stuff out of the kernel, with anti-cheat software – more accurately described as rootkits, like Riot’s Vanguard – being an obvious next target.

Perhaps this effort could have some beneficial side effects for gaming on Linux, which you should be doing anyway if you want better performance, because Windows games seem to perform better on Linux than they do on Windows.

Source: Hacker News

Source: Ars Technica

Nearly a decade ago, Ars testing found that Valve's "Steam Machines"-era version of SteamOS performed significantly worse than Windows when SteamOS's Linux game ports were tested on the same hardware as their Windows counterparts. Today, though, Ars testing on the Lenovo Legion Go S finds recent games generally run at higher frame rates on SteamOS 3.7 than on Windows 11. The performance advantage is yet another way that Valve's upstart OS is differentiating itself from the "default" Windows installation used by most PC gamers for decades now.

While users have been able to install Windows on the Steam Deck since its 2022 launch, Valve doesn't offer official "Windows on Deck" support for this alternative hardware use case. Lenovo's Legion Go S, on the other hand, is the first gaming portable explicitly designed to work with either Windows 11 (in hardware first released in January) or SteamOS (in hardware first released in May, alongside a new version of SteamOS designed for non-Valve AMD hardware).

To test the performance impact of this operating system choice, we started with the SteamOS version of the Legion Go S (provided by Lenovo) and tested five high-end 3D games released in the last five years using built-in benchmarking tools and two different graphics/resolution tiers. We then installed Windows 11 on the handheld, downloaded updated drivers from Lenovo's support site, and re-ran the benchmarks on the same games downloaded through Steam for Windows.

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Source: Ars Technica

Last fall, Microsoft announced that individuals who wanted to keep using Windows 10 past its official end-of-support date could do so by opting into the company's Extended Security Update (ESU) program at a cost of $30 per PC. That payment would get users a single year of additional security updates. Today, less than four months before that October 14, 2025, cutoff, Microsoft is announcing additional options for people who can't or don't want to pay that fee.

Individuals who want to pay $30 for the additional year of updates will still be able to do so. But Microsoft will also extend a year of additional Windows 10 security updates to any users who opt into Windows Backup, a relatively recent Windows 10 and Windows 11 app that backs up some settings and files using a Microsoft account. Users can also opt into ESU updates by spending 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which are handed out for everything from making purchases with your Microsoft account to doing Bing searches.

These offers don't formally extend the end-of-support date for Windows 10. But for users who don't want to move to Windows 11 or who can't do so because their PC doesn't meet the requirements, they do effectively offer an additional year of free updates for the OS that's still installed on a slim majority of the world’s Windows PCs, according to Statcounter data.

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Source: Slashdot

Magic Lantern, the popular open-source suite of software enhancements for Canon DSLR cameras, has returned under new leadership. The revived project aims to offer regular updates and support for additional models, including compatibility for Canon's newer mirrorless cameras equipped with DIGIC X processors. PetaPixel reports: The new lead developer, names_are_hard, announced Magic Lantern's return yesterday on Magic Lantern's forums, seen by Reddit r/cinematography users and confirmed on the official Magic Lantern website. "It's been a long journey, but official Magic Lantern builds return, for all cameras," names_are_hard writes. They add that this means that there will be new, regular releases for all supported cameras and new cameras will be supported. As of now, the supported cameras are almost entirely DSLR models, save for tools for the original EOS M mirrorless camera. However, one of the members of the core Magic Lantern team, which comprises developers g3ggo, kitor, and WalterSchulz, says the team is looking at supporting cameras with DIGIC X processors, which includes mirrorless EOS R models. "It would be awesome if they start supporting new cameras. Imaging unlocking Open Gate on the R5/R6 lines, or RAW on cameras that don't have it (like R6, R7, etc.)," writes Redditor user machado34. "I believe it will be possible. They say they're exploring up to DIGIC X," adds 3dforlife. "In fact we are," developer kitor replies. "Just DIGIC 8 is stubborn and X adds some new (undocumented) hardware on top of that." Kitor is listed as the chief DIGIC 8 and DIGIC X hacker on Magic Lantern's forums, plus kitor is chiefly in charge of the revived website and Magic Lantern's social media presence. If the team can crack mirrorless cameras, it would be a boon. [...] The new Magic Lantern core team of devs, plus many other key players who are involved to various degrees in bringing Magic Lantern back to life, have built a new repo, formalized the code base, and developed a new, efficient build system. "Around 2020, our old lead dev, a1ex, after years of hard work, left the project. The documentation was fragmentary. Nobody understood the build system. A very small number of volunteers kept things alive, but nothing worked well. Nobody had deep knowledge of Magic Lantern code," names_are_hard writes. "Those that remained had to learn how everything worked, then fix it. Then add support for new cams without breaking the old ones." "We have an updated website. We have a new repo. We have new supported models. We have a new build system. We have cleaner, faster, smaller code." The team is now using Git, building on modern operating systems with contemporary tools, and compiling clean. "This was a lot of work, and invisible to users, but very useful for devs. It's easier than ever to join as a dev." Alongside the exciting return, Magic Lantern has added support for numerous new Canon DSLR cameras, including the 200D, 6D Mark II, 750D, and 7D Mark II.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Arch Linux: Recent news updates

With 20250613.12fe085f-5, we split our firmware into several vendor-focused packages. linux-firmware is now an empty package depending on our default set of firmware.

Unfortunately, this coincided with upstream reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware, resulting in a situation that Pacman cannot handle. When attempting to upgrade from 20250508.788aadc8-2 or earlier, you will see the following errors:

linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad103 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad104 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad106 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad107 exists in filesystem

To progress with the system upgrade, first remove linux-firmware, then reinstall it as part of the upgrade:

# pacman -Rdd linux-firmware
# pacman -Syu linux-firmware

Source: OSNews

It’s 2025, and we’re going to talk about BeOS, AtheOS, Cosmoe, and OpenBeOS, all in one news item, right here, right now, on OSNews.

In the very early 2000s, Cosmoe was a unique project that started out as a merger of the AtheOS userland with the Linux kernel. AtheOS, in turn, was one of the quintessential hobby operating systems of the golden age of the advanced hobby operating systems, the early 2000s. AtheOS would eventually be abandoned in 2002, but would be forked into Syllable and continue development until it, too, was eventually abandoned in 2012.

Cosmoe was the brainchild of Bill Hayden, and originally consisted of the AtheOS userland running on top of the Linux kernel, in order to address the lack of supported hardware a custom operating system kernel inevitably has to deal with. Not long after the start of Cosmoe, AtheOS was abandoned, as mentioned above, but a new project had entered the scene: OpenBeOS, now known as Haiku. Hayden switched gears, and instead started porting the parts that made up OpenBeOS to run on the Linux kernel.

This project progressed nicely, but in 2007 Cosmoe came to a halt (ironically, our last item about Cosmoe is “Cosmoe is back“) as Hayden had no more free time left to work on it, being a father of five, and so he decided to put the project on hold indefinitely. That is, until last year, when everything changed.

In mid-2024, my 3rd son Joshua, not even born when I started this project but who is now in college studying to be a programmer himself, had some questions about operating systems. I decided to dust off Cosmoe and see if I could get it running again, to show him what I had worked on. At first it would only compile and run on extremely old 32-bit versions of Mandrake Linux from 2007. But I had caught the bug again. Not only had I forgotten how fun Cosmoe was to program, but the intervening 17 years of progress made by OpenBeOS (now Haiku) made the certain aspects of this revival come at lightning speed. Day by day, week by week, I got it running on newer versions of Linux, and re-synchronized it with ever-more-recent releases of Haiku. After about 2 months of late-night effort, I had a version of Cosmoe that was 64-bit compatible, ran on multiple modern Linux releases, and was almost completely up-to-date with the latest Haiku source changes.

↫ Cosmoe’s history page

We’re halfway through 2025 now, and Cosmoe now exists as two separate, but related projects. There’s Cosmoe Classic, which is the updated and modernised incarnation of Cosmoe’s original concept: Haiku’s userland running on top of the Linux kernel. In its current form, it runs inside an SDL window on your Linux desktop, as there’s no native video driver. Cosmoe Classic, however, is not what Hayden is focusing on.

Instead, Hayden is focusing on the new Cosmoe, which takes the same idea – the Haiku userland running on a Linux kernel – but implements it in a completely different way:

Cosmoe is a C++ class library that allows developers to build rich, native Linux apps with the easy-to-use BeOS API. This library is a light-weight, serverless version of Cosmoe Classic which targets the Wayland compositor on Linux.

↫ Cosmoe’s GitLab page

What Cosmoe on Wayland (to differentiate it from Cosmoe Classic) allows you to do is run BeOS/Haiku applications on Linux, provided you are running Wayland. The project is in an alpha state, but once compiled, it comes with a few BeOS/Haiku sample applications you can run right on your Wayland-based Linux desktop. Hayden states that about 95% of the BeOS API is implemented in Cosmoe, with the TODO file giving an idea of what tasks need to be done to improve compatibility and implement other improvements.

The return of Cosmoe is certainly not something I saw coming, but I’m incredibly excited. I’m not entirely sure about the usefulness of running Haiku applications on Wayland on Linux, but who the hell cares – this is an awesome project, with a ton of cherished history behind it that gives me butterflies in my stomach. It’s absolutely beautiful to see a project like this come back to life in 2025.

Cosmoe is back. Again.