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  • Playing multimedia with Dillo

    Mon 5:32pm By Thom Holwerda
    What if you want to use a web browser like Dillo, which lacks JavaScript support and can’t play audio or video inside the browser? Dillo doesn’t have the capability to play audio or video directly from the browser, however it can easily offload this task…
  • The seL4 microkernel: an introduction

    Mon 2:45pm By Thom Holwerda
    This whitepaper provides an introduction to and overview of seL4. We explain what seL4 is (and is not) and explore its defining features. We explain what makes seL4 uniquely qualified as the operating-system kernel of choice for security- and safety-critical…
  • ReactOS 0.4.15 released

    Sat 10:20am By Thom Holwerda
    It’s been over three years since the last ReactOS release, but today, in honour of the first commit to the project by the oldest, still active contributor, the project released ReactOS 0.4.15. Of course, there’s been a steady stream of nightly releases, so…
  • Nvidia Linux GPU driver ported to Haiku

    Sat 5:13am By Thom Holwerda
    Nvidia releasing its Linux graphics driver as open source is already bearing fruit for alternative operating systems. As many people already knows, Nvidia published their kernel driver under MIT license: GitHub – NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules: NVIDIA Linux…
  • SoftBank acquires Ampere Computing

    Sat 5:01am By Thom Holwerda
    SoftBank Group Corp. today announced that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a leading independent silicon design company, in an all-cash transaction valued at $6.5 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Ampere will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of…
  • FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

    Thu 6:19pm By Thom Holwerda
    What do SourceHut, GNOME’s GitLab, and KDE’s GitLab have in common, other than all three of them being forges? Well, it turns out all three of them have been dealing with immense amounts of traffic from “AI” scrapers, who are effectively performing…
  • Memory safety for web fonts in Chrome: Google replaces FreeType with Rust-based alternative

    Thu 3:51pm By Thom Holwerda
    There’s no escaping Rust, and the language is leaving its mark everywhere. This time around, Chrome has replaced its use of FreeType with Skrifa, a Rust-based replacement. Skrifa is written in Rust, and created as a replacement for FreeType to make font…
  • I think we need a bigger boot partition

    Thu 3:10pm By Thom Holwerda
    Long ago, during the time of creation, I confidently waved my hand and allocated a 1GB ESP partition and a 1GB boot partition, thinking to myself with a confident smile that this would surely be more than enough for the foreseeable future. However, this…
  • GNOME 48 released

    Wed 7:40pm By Thom Holwerda
    One of the two major open source desktop environments, GNOME, just released version 48, and it’s got some very big and welcome improvements. First and foremost there’s dynamic triple-buffering, a feature that took over five years of extensive testing to…
  • Java 24 released

    Wed 7:17pm By Thom Holwerda
    Oracle, the company owned by a guy who purchased a huge chunk of the Kingdom of Hawaii from the Americans, has released Java 24. I’ll be honest and upfront: I just don’t care very much at all about this, as the only interaction I’ve had with Java over…
  • After 47 years, OpenVMS gets a package manager

    Mar 18, 2025, 7:30 pm By Thom Holwerda
    As of the 18th of February, OpenVMS, known for its stability and high-availability, 47 years old and ported to 4 different CPU architecture, has a package manager! This article shows you how to use the package manager and talks about a few of its quirks.…
  • Pebble unveils new devices, and strongly suggests you dump iOS for Android

    Mar 18, 2025, 5:47 pm By Thom Holwerda
    It’s barely been two months after the announcement that Pebble would return with new watches, and they’re already here – well, sort of. Pebble has announced two new watches for preorder, the Core 2 Duo and the Core Time 2. The former is effectively a…
  • Enlightenment 0.27.1 released

    Mar 18, 2025, 3:38 pm By Thom Holwerda
    A few months after 0.27.0 was released, we’ve got a small update for Enlightenment today, version 0.27.1. It’s a short list of bugfixes, and one tiny new feature: you can now use the scroll wheel to change the volume when your cursor is hovering over the…
  • GIMP 3.0 released

    Mar 17, 2025, 6:36 pm By Thom Holwerda
    It’s taken a Herculean seven-year effort, but GIMP 3.0 has finally been released. There are so many new features, changes, and improvements in this release that it’s impossible to highlight all of them. First and foremost, GIMP 3.0 marks the shift to GTK3…
  • More pro for the DEC Professional 380 (featuring PRO/VENIX)

    Mar 17, 2025, 3:45 pm By Thom Holwerda
    Settle down children, it’s time for another great article by Cameron Kaiser. This time, they’re going to tell us about the DEC Professional 380 running PRO/VENIX. The Pro 380 upgraded to the beefier J-11 (“Jaws”) CPU from the PDP-11/73, running two to…
  • Apple’s long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found

    Mar 17, 2025, 11:55 am By Thom Holwerda
    In 1994, a single Macintosh Performa model, the 550, came from the factory with a dedicated, hidden recovery partition that contained a System 7 system folder and a small application that would be set as bootable if the main operating system failed to boot.…