Thom Holwerda Archive

I can’t believe this is considered something I need to write about, but it’s still a very welcome new feature that surprisingly has taken this long to become available: iOS and iPadOS 18 now allow you to format external storage devices. Last year when I began testing iPadOS 17 betas, I noticed the addition of options for renaming and erasing external drives in the Files app. I watched these options over the course of the beta cycle for iPadOS 17 to see if any further changes would come. The one I watched most closely was the “Erase” option for external drives. This option uses the same glyph as the Erase option in Disc Utility on macOS. In Disc Utility on the Mac, in order to reformat an external drive, you first select the “Erase” option, and then additional options appear for selecting the new format you wish to reformat the drive with. When I saw the “Erase” option added in the Files app on iPadOS, I suspected that Apple might be moving towards adding these reformatting options into the Files app on iPadOS. And I’m excited to confirm that this is exactly what Apple has done in iPadOS 18! Kaleb Cadle It was soon confirmed this feature is available in iOS 18 as well. You can only format in APFS, ExFAT and FAT, so it’s not exactly a cornucopia of file systems to choose from, but it’s better than nothing. This won’t magically fix all the issues a lot of people have with especially iPadOS when it comes to feeling constrained when using their expensive, powerful tablets with detachable keyboards, but it takes away at least one tiny reason to keep a real computer around. Baby steps, I guess.

One of my biggest concerns regarding the state of the web isn’t ads (easily blocked) or machine learning (the legal system isn’t going to be kind to that), but the possible demise of Firefox. I’ve long been worried that with the seemingly never-ending downward marketshare spiral Firefox is in – it’s at like 3% now on desktop, even less on mobile – Mozilla’s pretty much sole source of income will eventually pull the plug, leaving the already struggling browser effectively for dead. I’ve continuously been warning that the first casualty of the downward spiral would be Firefox on platforms other than Windows and macOS. So, what do we make of Mozilla buying an online advertising analytics company? Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions. Laura Chambers They way Mozilla explains buying an advertising network is that the company wants to be a trailblazer privacy-conscious online advertising, since the current brand of online advertising, which relies on massive amounts of data collection, is unsustainable. Anonym instead employs a number of measures to ensure that privacy is guaranteed, from anonymous analytics to employing differential privacy when it comes to algorithms, ensuring data can’t be used to tack individual users. I have no reason to doubt Mozilla’s intentions here – at least for now – but intentions change, people in charge change, and circumstances change. Having an ad network integrated into the Mozilla organisation will surely lead to temptations of weakening Firefox’ privacy features and ad-blocking abilities, and just overall I find it an odd acquisition target for something like Mozilla, and antithetical to why most people use Firefox in the first place. What really doesn’t help is who originally founded Anonym – two former Facebook executives, backed by a load of venture capital. Do with that little tidbit of information as you please.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum, professor emeritus of Computer Science at VU Amsterdam, receives the ACM Software System Award for MINIX, which influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used operating systems, including Linux. Tanenbaum created MINIX 1.0 in 1987 to accompany his textbook, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. MINIX was a small microkernel-based UNIX operating system for the IBM PC, which was popular at the time. It was roughly 12,000 lines of code, and in addition to the microkernel, included a memory manager, file system and core UNIX utility programs. It became free open-source software in 2000. VU Amsterdam website Definitely a deserved award for Tanenbaum, and it’s a minuscule bit of pride that VU Amsterdam happens to be my Alma mater. He also wrote an article for OSAlert way back in 2006, detailing MINIX 3, which is definitely a cool notch to have on our belt.

There’s really a Linux distribution for everyone, it seems. EasyOS sounds like it’s going to be some Debian derivative with a theme or something, but it’s truly something different – in fact, it has such a unique philosophy and approach to everything I barely know where to even start. Everything in EasyOS runs in containers, in the distribution’s own custom container format, even entire desktop environments, and containers are configured entirely graphically. EasyOS runs every application in RAM, making it insanely fast, and you can save the contents of RAM to disk whenever you want. You can also choose a special boot option where the entire session is only loaded in RAM, with disk access entirely disabled, for maximum security. Now things are going to get weird. In EasyOS, you always run as root, which may seem like a stupid thing to do, and I’m sure some people will find this offputting. The idea, however, is you run every application as its own user (e.g. Firefox runs as the “firefox” user), entirely isolated from every other user, or in containers with further constraints applied. I honestly kind of like this approach. If these first few details of what EasyOS is going for tickles your fancy, I really urge you to read the rest of their detailed explanation of what, exactly, EasyOS is going for. It’s an opinionated distribution, for sure, but it’s opinionated in a way where they’re clearly putting a lot of thought into the decisions they make. I’m definitely feeling the pull to give it a try and see if it’s something for me.

It should be no secret to anyone reading OSAlert that I’m not exactly a fan of Windows. While I grew up using MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x, the move to Windows XP was a sour one for me, and ever since I’ve vastly preferred first BeOS, and then Linux. When, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Wine community and Valve gaming on Linux became a boring, it-just-works affair, I said goodbye to my final gaming-only Windows installation about four or so years ago. However, I also strongly believe that in order to be able to fairly criticise or dislike something, you should at least have experience with it. As such, I decided it was time for what I expected was going to be some serious technology BDSM, and I installed Windows 11 on my workstation and force myself to use it for a few weeks to see if Microsoft’s latest operating system truly was as bad as I make it out to be in my head. Installing Windows 11 Technically speaking, my workstation is not supported by Windows 11. Despite packing two Intel Xeon E5 V4 2640 CPUs for a total of 20 cores and 40 threads, 32 GB of ECC RAM, an AMD Radeon Pro w5700, and the usual stuff like an M.2 SSD, this machine apparently did not meet the minimum specifications for Windows 11 since it has no TPM 2.0 security chip, and the processors were deemed too old. Luckily, these limitations are entirely artificial and meaningless, and using Ventoy, which by default disables these silly restrictions, I was able to install Windows 11 just fine. During installation, you run into the first problem if you’re coming from a different operating system – even after all these years, Windows still does not give a single hootin’ toot about any existing operating systems or bootloaders on your machine. This wasn’t an issue for me since I was going to allow Windows to take over the entire machine, but for those of used to have control over what happens when we install our operating systems, be advised that your other operating systems will most likely be rendered unbootable. The tools you have access to during installation for things like disk partitioning are also incredibly limited, and there’s nothing like the live environments you’re used to from the Linux world – all you get is an installer. In addition, since Windows only really supports FAT and NTFS file systems, your existing ext4, btrfs, UFS, or ZFS partitions used by your Linux or BSD installs will not work at all in Windows. Again – be advised that Windows is a very limited operating system compared to Linux or BSD. Once the actual installation part is done, you’re treated to a lengthy – and I truly mean lengthy – out of box experience. This is where you first get a glimpse of just how much data Microsoft wants to collect from its Windows users, and it stands in stark contrast to what I’m used to as a Linux user. On my Linux distribution of choice, Fedora KDE, there’s really only KDE’s opt-in, voluntary User Feedback option, which only collects basic system information in an entirely anonymous way. Windows, meanwhile, seems to want to collect pretty much everything you do on your machine, and while there’s some prompts to reduce the amount of data it collects, even with everything set to minimum it’s still quite a lot. Once you’re past the out of box experience, you can finally start using your new Windows installation – but actually not really. Unlike a Linux distribution, where all your hardware is detected automatically and will use the latest drivers, on Windows, you will most likely have to do some manual driver hunting, searching the web for PCI and vendor IDs to hopefully locate the correct drivers, which isn’t always easy. To make matters worse, even if Windows Update installs the correct drivers for you, those are often outdated, and you’re better off downloading the latest versions straight from the vendors’ websites. This is especially problematic for motherboard drivers – motherboard vendor websites often list horribly outdated drivers. Updating Windows 11 Once you have all the drivers installed and updated, which often requires several reboots, you might notice that your system seems to be awfully busy, even when you’re not actually doing anything with it. Most likely, this means Windows Update is running in the background, sucking up a lot of system resources. If you’re used to Linux or BSD, where updating is a quick and centralised process, updating things on Windows is a complete and utter mess. Instead of just updating everything all at once, Windows Update will often require several different rounds of updates, marked by reboots. You’ll also discover that Windows Update is not only incredibly slow both when it comes to downloading and installing, but that it’s also incredibly buggy. Updates will randomly fail to install for no apparent reason, and there’s a whole cottage industry of useless ML and SEO content on the internet trying to “help” you fix these issues. On my system, without doing anything, Windows Update managed to break itself in less than 24 hours – it listed 79 (!) driver updates related to the two Xeon processors (I assume it listed certain drivers for every single of the 40 threads), but every single one of them, save for one or two, would fail to install with a useless generic error code. Every time I tried to install them, one or two more would install, with everything else failing, until eventually the update process just hung the entire system. A few days later, the listed updated just disappeared entirely from Windows Update. The updates had no KB numbers, so it was impossible to find any information on them, and to this day, I have no idea what was going on here. Even after battling your way through Windows Update, you’re not done actually updating your system. Unlike,

ExectOS is a preemptive, reentrant multitasking operating system that implements the XT architecture which derives from NT architecture. It is modular, and consists of two main layers: microkernel and user modes. Its’ kernel mode has full access to the hardware and system resources and runs code in a protected memory area. It consists of executive services, which is itself made up on many modules that do specific tasks, a kernel and drivers. Unlike the NT, system does not feature a separate Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) between the physical hardware and the rest of the OS. Instead, XT architecture integrates a hardware specific code with the kernel. The user mode is made up of subsystems and it has been designed to run applications written for many different types of operating systems. This allows us to implement any environment subsystem to support applications that are strictly written to the corresponding standard (eg. DOS, or POSIX). Thanks to that ExectOS will allow to run existing software, including Win32 applications. ExectOS website What ExectOS seems to be is an implementation very close to what Windows NT originally was – implementing the theory of Windows NT, not the reality. It’s clearly still in very early development, but in theory, I really like the idea of what they’re trying to achieve here. Windows NT is, after all, in and of itself not a bad concept – it’s just been tarred and feathered by decades of mismanagement from Microsoft. Implementing something that closely resembles the original, minimalist theories behind NT could lead to an interesting operating system for sure. ExectOS is open source, contains its own boot loader, only runs on EFI, and installation on real hardware, while technically possible, is discouraged.

Framework, the company making modular, upgradeable, and repairable laptops, and DeepComputing, the same company that’s making the DC ROMA II RISC-V laptop we talked about last week, have announced something incredibly cool: a brand new RISC-V mainboard that fits right into existing Framework 13 laptops. Sporting a RISC-V StarFive JH7110 SoC, this groundbreaking Mainboard was independently designed and developed by DeepComputing. It’s the main component of the very first RISC-V laptop to run Canonical’s Ubuntu Desktop and Server, and the Fedora Desktop OS and represents the first independently developed Mainboard for a Framework Laptop. The DeepComputing website For a company that was predicted to fail by a popular Apple spokesperson, it seems Framework is doing remarkably well. This new mainboard is the first one not made by Framework itself, and is the clearest validation yet of the concept put into the market by the Framework team. I can’t recall the last time you could buy a laptop powered by one architecture, and then upgrade to an entirely different architecture down the line, just by replacing the mainboard. The news of this RISC-V mainboard has made me dream of other possibilities – like someone crazy enough to design, I don’t know, a POWER10 or POWER11 mainboard? Entirely impossible and unlikely due to heat constraints, but one may dream, right?

There’s incredibly good news for people who use accessibility tools on Linux, but who were facing serious, gamebreaking problems when trying to use Wayland. Matt Campbell, of the GNOME accessibility team, has been hard at work on an entirely new accessibility architecture for modern free desktops, and he’s got some impressive results to show for it already. I’ve now implemented enough of the new architecture that Orca is basically usable on Wayland with some real GTK 4 apps, including Nautilus, Text Editor, Podcasts, and the Fractal client for Matrix. Orca keyboard commands and keyboard learn mode work, with either Caps Lock or Insert as the Orca modifier. Mouse review also works more or less. Flat review is also working. The Orca command to left-click the current flat review item works for standard GTK 4 widgets. Matt Campbell One of the major goals of the project was to enable such accessibility support for Flatpak applications without having to pass an exception for the AT-SPI bus. what this means is that the new accessibility architecture can run as part of a Flatpak application without having to break out of their sandbox, which is obviously a hugely important feature to implement. There’s still a lot of work to be done, though. Something like the GNOME shell doesn’t yet support Newton, of course, so that’s still using the older, much slower AT-SPI bus. Wayland also doesn’t support mouse synthesizing yet, things like font, size, style, and colour aren’t exposed yet, and there’s a many more limitations due to this being such a new project. The project also isn’t trying to be GNOME-specific; Campbell wants to work with the other desktops to eventually end up with an accessibility architecture that is truly cross-desktop. The blog post further goes into great detail about implementation details, current and possible future shortcomings, and a lot more.

I’ve always found the world of DOS versions and variants to be confusing, since most of it took place when I was very young (I’m from 1984) so I wasn’t paying much attention to computing quite yet, other than playing DOS games. One of the variants of DOS I never quite understood where it was from until much, much later, was DR-DOS. To this day, I pronounce this as “Doctor DOS”. If you’re also a little unclear on what, exactly, DR-DOS was, Bradford Morgan White has an excellent article detailing the origins and history of DR-DOS, making it very easy to get up to speed and expand your knowledge on DOS, which is surely a very marketable skill in the days of Electron and Electron for Developers. DR DOS was a great product. It was superior to other DOS versions in many ways, and it is certainly possible that it could have been more successful were it not for Microsoft Windows having been so wildly successful. Starting with Windows 95, the majority of computer users simply didn’t much care about which DOS loaded Windows so long as it worked. There’s quite a bit of lore regarding legal battles and copyrights surrounding CP/M and DOS involving Microsoft and Digital Research. This has been covered in previous articles to some extent, but I am not really certain how much would have changed had Microsoft and Digital Research got on. Gates and Kildall had been quite friendly at one point, and we know that the two mutually chose not to work together due to differences in business practices and beliefs. Kildall chose to be quite a bit more friendly and less competitive while Gates very much chose to be competitive and at times a bit ruthless. Additionally, Kildall sold DRI rather than continue the fight, and DRI had never really attempted to combine DR DOS with GEM as a cohesive product to fight Windows before Windows became the ultimate ruler of the OS market following Windows 3.1’s release. Still, it was an absolutely brilliant product and part of me will always feel that it ought to have won. Bradford Morgan White I can definitely imagine an alternative timeline in which Digital Research managed to combine DR-DOS with GEM in a more attractive way, stealing Microsoft’s thunder before Gates’ balls got rolling properly with Windows 3.x. It’s one of the many, many what-ifs in this sector, but not one you often hear or read about.

To lock subscribers into recurring monthly payments, Adobe would typically pre-select by default its most popular “annual paid monthly” plan, the FTC alleged. That subscription option locked users into an annual plan despite paying month to month. If they canceled after a two-week period, they’d owe Adobe an early termination fee (ETF) that costs 50 percent of their remaining annual subscription. The “material terms” of this fee are hidden during enrollment, the FTC claimed, only appearing in “disclosures that are designed to go unnoticed and that most consumers never see.” Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica There’s a sucker for every corporation, but I highly doubt there’s anyone out there who would consider this a fair business practice. This is so obviously designed to hide costs during sign-up, and then unveil them when the user considers quitting. If this is deemed legal or allowed, you can expect everyone to jump on this bandwagon to scam users out of their money. It goes further than this, though. According to the FTC, Adobe knew this practice was shady, but continued it anyway because altering it would negatively affect the bottom line. The FTC is actually targeting two Adobe executives directly, which is always nice to hear – it’s usually management that pushes such illegal practices through, leaving the lower ranks little choice but to comply or lose their job. Stuff like this is exactly why confidence in the major technology companies is at an all-time low.

Less than a month after 3.5.0, IceWM is already shipping version 3.6.0. Once again not a major, earth-shattering release, it does contain at least one really cool feature that I think it pretty nifty: if you double-click on a window border, it will maximise just that side of the window. Pretty neat. For the rest, it’s small changes and bug fixes for this venerable window manager.

It seems that if you want to steer clear from having Facebook use your Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. data for machine learning training, you might want to consider moving to the European Union. Meta has apparently paused plans to process mounds of user data to bring new AI experiences to Europe. The decision comes after data regulators rebuffed the tech giant’s claims that it had “legitimate interests” in processing European Union- and European Economic Area (EEA)-based Facebook and Instagram users’ data—including personal posts and pictures—to train future AI tools. Ashley Belanger These are just the opening salvos of the legal war that’s brewing here, so who knows how it’s going to turn out. For now, though, European Union Facebook users are safe from Facebook’s machine learning training.

I have a feeling Microsoft is really starting to feel some pressure about its plans to abandon Windows 10 next year. Data shows that 70% of Windows users are still using Windows 10, and this percentage has proven to be remarkably resilient, making it very likely that hundreds of millions of Windows users will be out of regular, mainstream support and security patches next year. It seems Microsoft is, therefore, turning up the PR campaign, this time by publishing a blog post about myths and misconceptions about Windows 11. The kind of supposed myths and misconceptions Microsoft details are exactly the kind of stuff corporations with large deployments worry about at night. For instance, Microsoft repeatedly bangs the drum on application compatibility, stating that despite the change in number – 10 to 11 – Windows 11 is built on the same base as its predecessor, and as such, touts 99.7% application compatibility. Furthermore, Microsoft adds that if businesses to suffer from an incompatibility, they can use something call App Assure – which I will intentionally mispronounce until the day I die because I’m apparently a child – to fix any issues. Apparently, the visual changes to the user interface in Windows 11 are also a cause of concern for businesses, as Microsoft dedicated an entire entry to this, citing a study that the visual changes do not negatively impact productivity. The blog post then goes on to explain how the changes are actually really great and enhance productivity – you know, the usual PR speak. There’s more in the blog post, and I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more and more of this kind of PR offensive as the cut-off date for Windows 10 support nears. Windows 10 users will probably also see more and more Windows 11 ads when using their computers, too, urging them to upgrade even when they very well cannot because of missing TPMs or unsupported processors. I don’t think any of these things will work to bring that 70% number down much over the next 12 months, and that’s a big problem for Microsoft. I’m not going to make any predictions, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft will simply be forced by, well, reality to extend the official support for Windows 10 well beyond 2025. Especially with all the recent investigations into Microsoft’s shoddy internal security culture, there’s just no way they can cut 70% of their users off from security updates and patches.

Way, way, way back in 2009, we reported on a small hobby operating system called StreamOS – version 0.21-RC1 had just been released that day. StreamOS was a 32-bit operating system written in Object Pascal using the Free Pascal Compiler, running on top of FreeDOS. It turns out that its creator, Oleksandr Natalenko (yes, the same person), recovered the old code, and republished it on Codeberg for posterity. It’s not a complete history, rather a couple of larger breadcrumbs stuck together with git. I didn’t do source code management much back in the days, and there are still some intermediate dev bits scattered across my backup drive that I cannot even date properly, but three branches I pushed (along with binaries, btw; feel free to fire up that qemu of yours and see how it crashes!) should contain major parts of what was done. Oleksandr Natalenko It may not carry the same import as Doom for the SNES, but it’s still great to see such continuity 15 years apart. I hope Natalenko manages to recover the remaining bits and bobs too, because you may never know – someone might be interested in picking up this 15 year old baton.