fidzu : Operating Systems

Few things in technology are more complex, convoluted, and riddled with literally decades of drama than the Amiga community. Luckily for all of us, a significant step forward has been made today: several of the key corporate players in the community have struck agreements to settle their legal disputes. CIC licenses software and documentation for Commodore's 8-bit computers from Amiga. In return, Amiga is permitted to continue using the Commodore trademarks in a "historical or descriptive context," such as old documentation, copyright notices in existing software, or as symbols on a keyboard. The agreement with Hyperion does not change the status of AmigaOS 4 - which was never a point of contention, according to Amiga - but it does specify exactly which code and trademarks the Belgian company is permitted to use . But Hyperion's involvement in the 68k market will end on December 31, 2027: the licensee may continue to distribute versions of AmigaOS 3 until then, including the as-yet-unreleased AmigaOS 3.3. After that, Hyperion will deliver source code, revision history, and documentation for AmigaOS 3.1.4 and its updates, including all fixes and updates, but excluding AmigaOS 4 code backported into AmigaOS 3.2 or 3.3, to Amiga Corporation and release the developers involved in the project from all obligations to Hyperion. Amiga itself will then take over further development of AmigaOS 3 in the future. ↫ Post on amiga-news.de Hyperion is the company most known for developing AmigaOS 4, and with these agreements in place, they claim they can finally spend time focusing on getting AmigaOS 4.2 out the door. These agreements will also consolidate most of the AmigaOS 3.x code and IP under a single banner, which should make its status quite a bit clearer going forward. Whether or not any of this is actually good and beneficial to the Amiga platform as a whole and its individual branches - 3.x and 4.x, in particular - is anyone's guess. I don't think there's anyone here on OSNews who wouldn't be interested in, say, an affordable and - most importantly - available AmigaOS 4 machine. While I have no clue if clearing up some of the licensing, IP, and ownership confusions will aid in getting new AmigaOS 4 hardware, it surely won't make it any harder.

04 Aug 2026 9:52pm GMT

Don't have enough computing devices on your wish list yet? Do you have a need for a graphing calculator? No? What if it can run Linux and even Windows 10? I see I've got your attention. The HP Prime is a graphing calculator on the market since 2013, with a hardware revision in 2018 (the G2 model). It has a touch screen and as far as I can find, most people are happy with it and find it a very capable and fast calculator. Here are some pictures of the opened up calculator and here is a website with some more downloads. I'm not really interested in the calculator part. For most calculations I do for my day job, embedded programming, the HP-16C is a better fit. I was interested in this device because I found posts online suggesting it could run Linux and even a Windows 10 port. ↫ Remy van Elst I had no idea just how overpowered - for a graphing calculator - the G2 really is. It's basically an Android smartphone from a few years ago, and that means that yes, it can run Linux, including X, Doom, and tons of other applications. It's not the easiest of devices to get custom software onto, but also not particularly difficult - you need to open it up and short two pads - so if you have one, it's definitely a fun project. Apparently, someone also ported EUFI for Windows 10 to this thing, so you can do silly stuff like run the Windows calculator on the G2 calculator. Wild. Now I kind of want one.

04 Aug 2026 9:30pm GMT

Want to switch to 9front, especially with the new release having just been made available, but really need Wireguard? Fret not! Wireguard is now available on 9front, experimentally.

04 Aug 2026 9:07pm GMT

Today, I wanted to show you one of the most fascinating and surprising operating systems ever created. It's not another Unix, Linux, or Windows. It is an architecture that went its own way and proved that systems engineering design can look completely different. I'm talking about IBM's child, which for many might be synonymous with "boring banking systems," but in reality, is one of the most uncompromising projects in IT history. While we get excited about abstraction and virtualization today, thinking we are discovering new lands, this system was doing it decades ago. Imagine a system that doesn't know the concept of a "file" in the way we understand it. A system where everything is an object, and all disk and operational memory form one vast, flat space. If you are looking for proof that true engineering doesn't need buzzwords to blow you away, I invite you to read on. ↫ Kamil Pytliński Ever since watching Clabretro's detailed video about getting IBM i to work on his own IBM POWER hardware and then remoting into them, I've been obsessed with running IBM i at home. It feels like the final boss of operating systems to dive into and explore, hidden in the deepest, darkest trenches of the ocean of technology. Everything about IBM i feels alien, complex, convoluted, opaque, and overwhelming, and you can probably dedicate your entire career to working with this platform and somehow still learn new things about it every day. There's something brutalist about IBM i, and I so desperately want to bang my head on its concrete walls.

04 Aug 2026 9:04pm GMT

The best operating system in the world, 9front, released its latest version, "THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN". As I'm sure you know, 9front is a fork of plan9, and one that's actually consistently maintained and developed. It brings an improved affinewarp API for scaling and zooming, a new Synaptics driver, and a new driver for UPSs. There's also a new tool called gdbfs, which allows you to mount a remote gdb at /proc. Of course, there's much more than this, including the usual list of bugfixes and small changes. Few of us are worthy of using 9front, but if you are, you already know where to get it and how to update.

03 Aug 2026 3:56pm GMT

Cameron Kaiser's articles are always a right treat, and this one's no different. It's about running MkLinux on the Apple Workgroup Server, the regular Mac rebadged into a server product and predecessor to Apple's first real server product, the Apple Network Server running AIX. The Workgroup Servers were originally marketed with Apple's UNIX variant, A/UX, but with this operating system not surviving the transition to PowerPC processors, Apple started offering other options. A/UX ultimately didn't survive the 1994 68K transition to PowerPC, but in 1996 Apple publicly offered another option: run Linux, using the Mach microkernel. Although MkLinux emerged after the 9150's discontinuation, it's still just an overgrown NuBus Power Mac, so between more RAM, a beefier CPU upgrade and various video cards, by the end of this article we ought to have a configuration that gives us the best of two worlds - classic MacOS and MkLinux - in one server. ↫ Cameron Kaiser I never really stopped to think that MkLinux really was, but it's a lot more interesting than just an early Linux port to PowerPC Macs. In fact, it ran the monolithic Linux kernel as a userspace process on top of the Mach microkernel, which made it a valuable testing ground for Apple's later XNU efforts. It's wild that Apple had an official, blessed Linux operating system as early as the mid '90s, even if its performance was apparently not particularly great - due to the overhead of running it atop Mach - and Jobs canned it as soon as he came back to the company.

03 Aug 2026 12:54pm GMT

Whenever the EU steps in to regulate the big technology companies, the response from news outlets and bloggers (often funded or outright owned by right-wing extremists) is to claim it's just a bunch of dumb , tech-illiterate bureaucrats telling the vastly more intelligent and superior technology companies what to do. Of course, this is just propaganda. Case in point: Something big just happened. As the Open Home Foundation's Android developer for Home Assistant, I was invited by the European Commission (EC) to consult on Android interoperability. The call for feedback was part of the Commission's work under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). For anyone unfamiliar, the DMA is an EU law that defines and regulates "gatekeeper platforms" - those that offer "core" services like search engines, app stores, and messaging platforms - to make digital markets fairer and more open to competition. As you might imagine, I had plenty to say about Google's restrictions on Android, especially the tech giant limiting wake word detection to its own Gemini assistant, a concern I surfaced in our Home Assistant 2026.3 Release Party. To put it plainly, Google had no grounds for limiting Android interoperability in the first place, other than to give itself the upper hand. We knew our community deserved better, and that's what we told the Commission. The result? The EC listened to us and all the other organizations that contributed. On July 16, 2026, the European Commission adopted a decision under the DMA that requires Alphabet (Google's parent company) to open up eleven Android features, including always-on wake word detection, ambient sensor access, and screen automation - to all assistants, on equal terms. ↫ Timothy Nibeaudeau What's really interesting is just how deeply technical and detailed this new EU decision really is. Timothy Nibeaudeau laid out the technical details of how wake word detection on Android works for the European Commission - in short, a DSP runs a really tiny model in a process isolated from the network to detect just a specific wakeword, and only once that wakeword is detected does it hand things off to a larger model running on the actual main SoC - and the EC's new decision accurately and precisely describes this method and wrote their decision to take every detail into account. When I was invited to share these limitations (and others) with the Commission, I didn't hold back. Which is why we were thrilled to discover an impressively precise and technically accurate decision from the EU: it correctly describes the two-stage wake word architecture, the DSP, the isolated process, and the role coupling. The report went down to details we only figured out by reading Android's source code ourselves. ↫ Timothy Nibeaudeau The idea that the European Union and Commission are a bunch of dumb, illiterate bureaucrats imposing impossible, unworkable, unrealistic demands on poor, hardworking, honest technology companies is a bunch of propaganda paid for by these very same companies, and every decision and ruling by the EU around the Digital Markets Act further confirms this by having strong technological underpinnings and being based on the actual workings of the technologies they cover. The EU does a lot of dumb things - as any government body does - but you don't get to enjoy a nearly two-thirds approval rating for nothing, especially not in the face of the state of the world today. The Digital Markets Act has already proven to be incredibly effective, and this is exactly why the right-wing propaganda against it is reaching an ever crazier fever pitch. When basic consumer protection legislation makes the most powerful companies, right-wing media empires, and even the most powerful country in the world throw tamper tantrums like toddlers, you know you're doing something right.

03 Aug 2026 12:19pm GMT

NetBSD, the operating system specifically designed to run on anything from a supercomputer to a toothpick, just released version 11.0. There's a ton of changes and improvements here, such as a brand new port to RISC-V, which supports a number of the more popular RISC-V SoCs (sadly, not the one I have just yet). NetBSD 11.0 also adds initial support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite platform, as well as a port to the virt68k platform, which means the Motorola 68000 port in QEMU using paravirtualized devices. Speaking of virtualisation, they're also introducing a new MICROVM kernel for x86: New MICROVM kernel for x86, supporting both i386 and amd64, NetBSD 11.0 introduces a dedicated MICROVM kernel designed for extremely fast virtual machine boot, leveraging PVH boot, VirtIO MMIO, and multiple kernel optimizations, it can boot in about 10 ms on 2020-era x86 CPUs. ↫ NetBSD 11.0 release notes There's also improved support for Linux system calls in compat_linux, the npf firewall, and much more. Of course, the list of other improvements, buigfixes, and smaller changes is long, including many changes for old, outdated, or otherwise odd architectures and platforms, as is the NetBSD way. Which other operating system proudly lists substantial improvements to their PA-RISC, Motorola 68000, and Alpha ports, among others?

01 Aug 2026 9:14pm GMT

I have a policy to effectively never link to YouTube videos. I'll gladly make an exception for this one. Reflection is one of the most powerful concepts in Computer Science. Unfortunately, not every programming language is blessed enough to have it. In the 1980s, one company, Symbolics took the concept to the logical extreme. By representing EVERYTHING as objects; they created the most powerful (and inadvertently) least private operating system ever created! The company collapsed, but the ideas live on. Some modern languages got a full dose of reflection. Some…weren't so lucky. I ranked them all, and in the end I'll show you how I dragged C++ up a tier with my brand new runtime reflection library, CallMeMaybe! ↫ Laurie Wired The GitHub description of CallMeMaybe: CallMeMaybe (CMM) is a C++ runtime reflection library built on top of P2996 static reflection introduced in C++26. CMM purposefully mirrors many of the std::meta functions to provide a uniform interface, but allows runtime introspection, dynamic invocation, and instantiation by building a runtime reflection registry. Class members can be automatically traversed and reflected by simply adding ] as an annotation. CMM implements a custom type system to completely avoid RTTI requirements. ↫ CallMeMaybe GitHub page My YouTube linking policy will remain in place.

01 Aug 2026 9:05pm GMT

Tcl, or the "Tool Command Language", created and released by John Ousterhout in 1990, deserves a place among the greatest products of the human mind. Especially when combined with its better known graphical user interface Toolkit - Tk. In 1997 Ousterhout was awarded the ACM Software System Award for Tcl/Tk, an award given to institutions or individuals recognized for developing software systems with a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both. ↫ Armen Barsegyan Everything you could ever possibly want to know about Tcl/Tk. There's nothing to add here; if this is up your alley - and you know if it is - just go ahead and read it, and stop wasting time here.

31 Jul 2026 10:44pm GMT

Speaking of OpenBSD: Yes, you read that right. Modern development tools in the form of the LLVM compiler infrastructure is well on its way to supporting OpenBSD/sparc64 along with other more conventional architectures. The support is now ready for testing, via a patch set presented by Kirill A. Korinsky in a message to the tech@ mailing list, with the subject LLVM toolchain for sparc64. ↫ Peter N. M. Hansteen On a related note, the the entire LLVM stack (version 19.1.7, including llvm's binutils, clang, ldd) has also been ported to the SPARC version of Solaris 11 Express (snv_151a). This should make it possible to also port things like Rust and Zig to this same version of Solaris on SPARC, which is good news, because this release supports SPARC hardware long dropped by the current Solaris builds from Oracle.

31 Jul 2026 3:07pm GMT

As I mentioned in my OpenBSD 7.8 highlights post, development of relayd(8) and httpd(8) had stalled. Many diffs appeared on the tech@ mailing list from different contributors, but few were committed into the repository. The main reason was simple: Established OpenBSD developers weren't interested in these daemons anymore. Call it momentum, or timing. Around the same time, kirill@ and I started working on these daemons more actively. We both use them regularly and have real-world use cases. I support customers with OpenBSD setups that often involve complex httpd(8) and relayd(8) configurations. This practical need motivated me on many levels. ↫ Rafael Sadowski They've managed to do a ton of work on these two daemons, fixing many long-standing issues and reviewing tons of stalled patch submissions, while also modernising the code and adding new features. It's great to see people contribute significant time and energy to fixing up the tools they use for everyone else's benefit.

31 Jul 2026 2:55pm GMT

When I had to use Windows 11 for a month because you people paid me to do so, the one seemingly small thing that really ground my gears were Windows 11's terrible right-click (context) menus. They were full of stuff I didn't put there, slow to open, and in some places, a modern Windows 11 context menu would have its own old Win32 context menu with even more stuff. It seems Microsoft is finally going to fix all of this. This new compact menu will be much faster and more reliable, as it foregoes needing to load in all the third-party actions that slow it down currently. Additionally, at the Windows Insider Meetup in London, Microsoft showed me a new context menu customization feature coming soon that will let users configure what apps and actions appear in the right-click menu. ↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central Look, I know to us non-Windows users this seem like an incredibly small and dumb thing to focus on, but when your operating system is as much of a trashfire as Windows has become, improved context menus are massive improvements that make a meaningful difference. Of course, Microsoft makes these types of promises all the time, so I'll believe it when I see it.

30 Jul 2026 11:06pm GMT

We may all have a disdain for Chrome - OSNews users probably use Chrome a lot less than the average public - but that doesn't mean the browser doesn't sometimes do interesting things other browsers should copy. Chrome is in the the process of increasing its release cadence, but getting users to restart their browser more often than they already do to apply these higher number of updates is going to be a problem. As such, Google is working on something that seems quite obvious now that they've talking about it: Investing in "dynamic patching" that will eliminate the need for a full browser restart in most cases. By leveraging Chrome's multi-process architecture, dynamic patching sequentially replaces background child processes (like the Renderer and GPU) with updated binaries on the fly. Stay tuned to learn more as we research and develop this feature. ↫ Chrome Security Team Chrome was the first browser to use multiple processes, isolating tabs from one another so that if one website or tab went haywire, your other tabs would be unaffected. It makes perfect sense to have the browser use new, updated binaries for new tabs you open as soon as they become available, in a sort of ship-of-Theseus kind of approach to updating. Of course, you can't postpone the inevitable forever, but this should provide real-world benefits to users. Neat. The linked blog post goes into much more detail about other things too, like various low-level mitigations to prevent bugs and security issues from causing too much harm.

30 Jul 2026 10:53pm GMT

It's that time of the week again, I guess. The year is 2026, and I'm still amazed when I find a new entry in my Start menu's All apps list for an app I don't remember installing. This time, it's Microsoft again, and the product is OneDrive Photos, which appears to be yet another photo viewer and editor for Windows 11 that nobody asked to have installed automatically. While searching for Microsoft Photos, a new app called "OneDrive Photos" showed up in my results out of nowhere. It appears to have arrived either via Windows Update or an update for the OneDrive sync client on Windows. ↫ Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest Just don't use Windows. You people paid me to use it and it was not a fun experience.

29 Jul 2026 12:48pm GMT

Ubuntu Touch, the mobile Linux operating system originally started by, you guessed it, Ubuntu, but now managed by UBports, released versions 24.04-2.0 and 24.04-1.4. The latter is a maintenance release with some bug fixes and minor changes, while the former is a bigger release with quite a few improvements, so let's focus on that one. Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 updates the Chromium engine for the Morph browser from 87 to 134, which is massive leap forward, while still lagging behind the most recent version quite a bit. This release also adds a Widevine installer for people who want to view DRM-encumbered content on the web. This release also adds support for notches and rounded corners in smartphone displays, so that content in the UI can dodge these. There's also a screenshot editor for making basic edits to screenshots, as well as the ability to print straight from your device. Of course, there's the usual list of bugfixes and smaller improvements, and, most importantly of all, support for over 2000 new emoji. Existing users can use the regular update tools, but do note that you'll need to upgrade to 24.04-1.4 first, since it contains some provisions to enable the 24.04-2.0 update. If I had any of the listed supported devices, I would definitely want to do a proper review of Ubuntu Touch. It seems like it has made so much progress in recent years.

29 Jul 2026 12:39pm GMT