I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:

https://movq.de/v/56feb53912/s.png

https://movq.de/v/235c1eabac/MVI_8810.MOV.mp4

The biiiiiiiiiig problem is that the print head and plastic cover make it impossible to see what’s currently being printed, because this is not a typewriter. This means: In order to see what I just entered, I have to feed the paper back and forth and back and forth … it’s not ideal.

I got that idea of moving back/forth from Drew DeVault, who – as it turned out – did something similar a few years back. (I tried hard to read as little as possible of his blog post, because figuring things out myself is more fun. But that could mean I missed a great idea here or there.)

But hey, at least this is running on my Pentium 133 on SuSE Linux 6.4, printer connected with a parallel cable. 😍

(Also, yes, you can see the printouts of earlier tests and, yes, I used ed(1) wrong at one point. 🤪 And ls insisted on using colors …)

I’m using #Filen (@filen@filen) for a while now and I’m very pleased with it!

«Affordable zero-knowledge end to end encrypted cloud storage made in Germany.» Works on #Linux, nice well thought features.

So I’m going to share a referral link because «For every friend you invite to Filen you receive 10 GB - and your friend also receives 10B. It’s that easy»:

https://filen.io/r/631ce32074f259f710691e4eec751eb9

I have been using #Filen (@filen@filen) for a while now and I’m very pleased with it!

«Affordable zero-knowledge end to end encrypted cloud storage made in Germany.» Works on #Linux, nice well thought features.

So I’m going to share a referral link because «For every friend you invite to Filen you receive 10 GB - and your friend also receives 10B. It’s that easy»:

https://filen.io/r/631ce32074f259f710691e4eec751eb9

(Just for fun, SuSE Linux 6.4 from ~25 years ago: https://movq.de/v/dc62d0256c/s.png )

In 1996, they came up with the X11 “SECURITY” extension:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4w548u/what_is_up_with_the_x11_security_extension/

This is what could have (eventually) solved the security issues that we’re currently seeing with X11. Those issues are cited as one of the reasons for switching to Wayland.

That extension never took off. The person on reddit wonders why – I think it’s simple: Containers and sandboxes weren’t a thing in 1996. It hardly mattered if X11 was “insecure”. If you could run an X11 client, you probably already had access to the machine and could just do all kinds of other nasty things.

Today, sandboxing is a thing. Today, this matters.

I’ve heard so many times that “X11 is beyond fixable, it’s hopeless.” I don’t believe that. I believe that these problems are solveable with X11 and some devs have said “yeah, we could have kept working on it”. It’s that people don’t want to do it:

Why not extend the X server?

Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

I’m not in a position to judge the devs. Maybe the X.Org code really is so bad that you want to run away, screaming in horror. I don’t know.

But all this was a choice. I don’t buy the argument that we never would have gotten rid of things like core fonts.

All the toolkits and programs had to be ported to Wayland. A huge, still unfinished effort. If that was an acceptable thing to do, then it would have been acceptable to make an “X12” that keeps all the good things about X11, remains compatible where feasible, eliminates the problems, and requires some clients to be adjusted. (You could have still made “X11X12” like “XWayland” for actual legacy programs.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org True, at least old versions of KDE had icons:

https://movq.de/v/0e4af6fea1/s.png

GNOME, on the other hand, didn’t, at least to my old screenshots from 2007:

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2007%2D05%2D25%2D%2Dgnome2%2Dlaptop.png

I switched to Linux in 2007 and no window manager I used since then had icons, apparently. Crazy. An icon-less existence for 18 years. (But yeah, everything is keyboard-driven here as well and there are no buttons here, either.)

Anyway, my draft is making progress:

https://movq.de/v/5b7767f245/s.png

I do like this look. 😊

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. There’s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you don’t configure it? What’s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and it’s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue
        [[ "$lddout" == *'not found'* ]] && continue
        exec "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" "$@"
done

exit 1

Preexec, okay, then some auto-detection to use a toolkit matching your desktop environment …

… and then it invokes ldd? To find out if all the required libraries are installed for the auto-detected frontend?

Oof. I was sitting here wondering why it would use pinentry-gtk on one machine and pinentry-gnome3 on another, when both machines had the exact same configs. Yeah, but different libraries were installed. One machine was missing gcr, which is needed for pinentry-gnome3, so that machine (and that one alone) spawned pinentry-gtk …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hm, I don’t think so, the requested page was a Linux-specific post. 🤔 I sometimes wonder if privacy-oriented browsers might do this on purpose, to create garbage data? 🤔 No idea.

This is it, boys and girls! The year of the Linux Desktop is this! I can smell it! :-D

For the first time, Linux has officially broken the 5% desktop market share barrier in the United States of America! It’s a huge milestone for open-source and our fantastic Linux community.

PSA: setpriv on Linux supports Landlock.

If this twt goes through, then restricting the filesystem so that jenny can only write to ~/Mail/twt, ~/www/twtxt.txt, ~/.jenny-cache, and /tmp works.

Impossible Linux things in my to-do list:

• Fix erratically jumping mouse wheel scrolling on a Dell
  
• Make a “SysRq key” work so I can do “REISUB” or something, when my computer freezes
  

I must have spent days (multiples of 24 hours) trying to solve these things and maybe I should just give up.

I suppose that if I had a “Linux experienced” friend by my side these could be solved in minutes, maybe?

#OldManScreamsAtLinux

The Linux installation on my main PC turned 14 today:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This wasn’t always the case, though. Quake3, Quake4, Unreal Tournament 99 and 2004 are examples of games that used to run very well as native Linux games. But that was 20+ years ago …

@movq@www.uninformativ.de reminds me how many Windows games using Proton (or WINE with similar patches) on Linux run better than some of the old native Linux binaries.

In all fairness, GOG says that Forsaken is only supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – not current Arch Linux. If you ask me, this just goes to show that Linux is not a good platform for proprietary binary software.

Is it free software, do you have the source code? Then you’re good to go, things can be patched/updated (that can still be a lot of work). But proprietary binary blobs? Very bad idea.

I bought the “remastered” versions of Grim Fandango and Forsaken on GOG, because they’re super cheap at the moment. Both have native Linux versions.

And both these Linux version crap their pants. 🫤 The bundled SDL2 of Forsaken says it “can’t find a matching GLX visual” and I couldn’t figure out how to fix that. I didn’t spend a lot of time on Grim Fandango.

Both work great in Wine. 🤦

(I do have the original version of Grim Fandango from the 1990ies, but that one does not work so well in Wine. I figured, if it’s so cheap, why not. And I now get to play the english version. 😃 The german dub is pretty damn good, actually, but I always prefer the original these days.)

Speaking of Wine, Arch Linux completely fucked up Wine for me with the latest update.

• 16-bit support is gone.
  
• Performance of 3D games is horrible and unplayable.
  

Arch is shipping a WoW64 build now, which is not yet ready for prime time.

And then I realized that there’s actually only one stable Wine release per year but Arch has been shipping development releases all the time. That’s quite unusual. I’m used to Arch only shipping stable packages … huh.

Hopefully things will improve again. I’m not eager to build Wine from source. I’d rather ditch it and resort to my real Windows XP box for the little (retro)gaming that I do … 🫤

update on tux racer: ofc it doesn’t run on modern linux LMFAOOOOOOO i’m installing red hat in a VM right now

OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

SuSE Linux 6.4 and Arachne on DOS also work (with Windows 2000 as a call target):

• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#suse-linux-64
  
• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#arachne-on-dos

gamado à @aperture@aperture porque há meses/anos que quero escrever um texto sobre esta postura, e esta imagem explica tão bem o problema

(fonte)

Image

@movq@www.uninformativ.de you need to get a gold chain and hang this little penguin on it, so that nobody can doubt your Linux user status.

OH MY FUCKING GOD I’M GOING TO CRY I NEED BIG TUX SO BAD https://www.steiner-plueschshop.de/kuscheltiere/arktis-seetiere/pinguin-linux/

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev

You need break the routine.

I haven’t really done that lately. 🤔 Maybe have another go at Rust (given its increasing importance in the Linux kernel)? Or Elixir, yes, I only had some very, very brief contact with it. 🤔

I just came across an old forum posting of mine about Prolog. That brought up some memories. Prolog is pretty alien, but I do miss stuff like that because it’s so different.

Just thinking out loud here. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @quark@ferengi.one In 2014 one person created protocol ii. Later it forked in IDEC. Why i said this? Because it’s simple “federated” forum-like protocol where from your station fetch another every 5-10 minutes. Stations has topic-based channels like idec.talks, linux.16, haiku.os, zx.spectrum. In short it’s FIDO but.. more modern? Documentation: https://github.com/idec-net/new-docs (mostly Russian, but you can use translator, also protocol already translated to english)

Confession:

I’ve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other “modern” social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.

The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very “ego-centric”. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).

I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great – and it didn’t even suffer from the need to federate.

Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.

On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But it’s not that great and the protocol isn’t meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of “likes” has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. ☹️

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz At the core, you need an ngircd.conf like this:

[Global]
    Name = your.irc.server.com
    Password = yourfancypassword
    Listen = 0.0.0.0
    Ports = 6667

    AdminInfo1 = Well, me.
    AdminInfo2 = Over here!
    AdminEMail = forget.it@example.invalid

[Options]
    Ident = no
    PAM = no

[SSL]
    CertFile = /etc/ssl/acme/your.irc.server.com.fullchain.pem
    KeyFile = /etc/ssl/acme/private/your.irc.server.com.key
    DHFile = /etc/ngircd/dhparam.pem
    Ports = 6669

Start it and then you can connect on port 6667. (The SSL cert/key must be managed by an external tool, probably something like certbot or acme-client.)

I’m assuming OpenBSD here. Haven’t tried it on Linux lately, let alone Docker. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Since you have to check and double check everything it spits out (without providing sources), I don’t find any of this helpful. It’s like someone’s in the room with you and that person is saying random stuff that might or might not be correct. At best, it might spark some new idea in your head and then you follow that idea the traditional way.

Information published on the internet (or anywhere, for that matter) was never guaranteed to be correct. But at least you had a “frame of reference”: “Ah, I read this information about Linux on a blog that usually posts about Windows, so this one single Linux post might not necessarily be correct.” That is completely lost with LLMs. It’s literally all mushed together. 🤷

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I still have a photo taken by @prologic@twtxt.net as wallpaper on my laptop (Linux)! 😀

OH wait! 😳 Why am I storing the timestamp as created = 2025-04-07T19:59:51Z ?! 😱 @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s feed shows:

2025-04-07T19:59:51+00:00	I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

    $ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
    [2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴

Hmmmm

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Not according to the output of ./yarnc debug <your feed url>:

znf6csa 2025-04-07T19:59:51+00:00	I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

    $ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
    [2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴

Doesn’t look like it Hmmm

sqlite> select * from twts where content LIKE '%Linux installation%';
    hash = znf6csa
feed_url = https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt
 content = I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

    $ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
    [2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴
 created = 2025-04-07T19:59:51Z
 subject = (#znf6csa)
mentions = []
    tags = []
   links = []

I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴

I’m playing with ratterplatter again: It’s a toy that watches disk I/O and emulates the noise of a real hard disk. (Linux only.) It uses sound samples from one of my older disks.

I tried a different approach at estimating the disk activity and I think I finally got it right (after almost 10 years … 🤦).

Demo, booting a Windows 2000 VM: https://movq.de/v/1400544cc6/2kboot-ratterplatter-2.mp4

(For this purpose alone, I put a couple of mini speakers into my PC case, so that the noise comes from the right place: https://movq.de/v/a3b2dc0932/speakers.jpg)

The results aren’t too bad, but this thing can’t be super accurate due to the huge I/O caches that we have these days. For the video, I dropped the caches before booting Windows, otherwise you would have heard almost nothing.

FWIW, if you don’t know it yet, this is the equivalent for proper keyboard sound: https://github.com/zevv/bucklespring

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Using full-blown Cloud services is good for old people like me who don’t want to do on-call duty when a disk fails. 😂 I like sleep! 😂

Jokes aside, I like IaaS as a middle ground. There are IaaS hosters who allow you to spin up VMs as you wish and connect them in a network as you wish. You get direct access to all those Linux boxes and to a layer 2 network, so you can do all the fun networking stuff like BGP, VRRP, IPSec/Wireguard, whatever. And you never have to worry about failing disks, server racks getting full, cable management, all that. 😅

I’m confident that we will always need people who do bare-bones or “low-level” stuff instead of just click some Cloud service. I guess that smaller companies don’t use Cloud services very often (because it’s way too expensive for them).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de ancient……. i love old linux it’s so janky

wahhh i wanna work towards my dream of offering pay as you can web hosting (static & dynamic) but i don’t know how!!!!! i keep drifting towards hosting panels but i don’t exactly have fresh linux servers for those nor do i like the level of access they require. so i’m like ok i can do the static site part with SFTP chroot jails and a front-end like filebrowser or something…. but then what about the dynamic sites!!!!!!! UGH

granted i doubt i’d get much interest in dynamic sites but i’d like to do this old school where i can offer people isolated mySQL databases or something for some project (i’m thinking PHP based fanlistings), which means i could do it the old school way of… people ask me to run it and i do it for them. but i kind of want to let people have access to be able to do it themselves just short of giving them SSH access which isn’t happening

Hacer software código opensource es desafiante y paulatinamente desgasta a su autor. Todo comienza con pasión y entusiasmo, por supuesto. Si logras repercusión, te enfrentas a una carrera de fondo que muchos terminan abandonando por las demandas constantes de usuarios que, a menudo, no valoran el trabajo ni contribuyen de manera significativa. Por mencionar un caso reciente: Hector Martin. Líder del proyecto Asahi Linux, quien dedicó años a adaptar Linux para los procesadores Apple Silicon, un logro técnico impresionante. Sin embargo, terminó renunciando debido a la presión de usuarios que exigían soporte y mejoras como si fueran clientes pagos.

La mayoría de los mantenedores no reciben ningún soporte económico. Solo unos pocos proyectos logran sostenibilidad financiera a través de patrocinios, mientras que la mayoría de los desarrolladores terminan con un segundo empleo no remunerado.

Sin un cambio en la forma en que se valora y apoya los proyectos Opensource, y no solo hablo de las grandes empresas multimillonarias. Sería una perdida para todos si acabaremos con un ecosistema de software archivado y abandonado.

Ahora te paso la pelota a ti, ¿cuando fue la última vez que apoyaste a un mantenedor de software opensource?

#opensource #software #sostenibilidad

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I also thought that I have a new Linux friend the other day. But it was just a fake KDE look from Redmond. :-(

Ahh yes, what I like to call “wild wild west” upgrading.😂
Felt like that when I upgraded/updated an Arch Linux machine that had been sitting for a couple years unused.

been thinking about trying arch linux but no i will not become the type of person that uses arch

just spent like half an hour finding a terminal based color picker that would just. turn the cursor into a cross hair and let me pick from the screen. in linux fashion this was somehow difficult

good morning everyone i want to do epic linux desktop ricing again

@movq@www.uninformativ.de my util-linux 2.40.2 version of cal seems to do week 53.

Always a great feeling when you can solve npm install problems by simply copying over the whole node_modules folder from your own (linux) machine. One of the benefits of developing on a Linux machine I suppose.

We need prediction markets for Linux kernel development.

@bender@twtxt.net The tagline of Timeline is “a single user twtxt/yarn pod” not just a yarn pod. Similar to GNU/Linux. When we came up with the concept of Yarn Social it was a way to rebrand twtxt with the extensions that makes conversations like this possible.

@bender@twtxt.net Linux and Android. I would never iOS my friend.

Another minor inconvenience could have been avoided by reading the Arch Linux news feed before upgrading.

and you can even mount it on windows/linux/os x!

Sad to see moc removed from the official arch linux repos, but also cool to learn the debian project has been quietly patching it and keeping it up to date in recent years. Long live the music on console player. (And debian!) :-)

My linux installs all have TPM enabled. …

Printing pictures on Linux is still a bit of a challenge.

Since I have these simple, yet effective bash shell commands, which allow me to edit notes, plans, todos and statuses from the terminal, I feel liberated from overly complex software - everything is just text files and applications which come preinstalled on every Linux system.

the name of the lost+found/ directory encapsulates all that is great & bad about linux. i won’t take any questions.

I just went to type the phrase “I avoid Linux like the plague” but then remembered that we’ve all learned that most people won’t actually go much out of their way to avoid the plague.

@fastidious@arrakis.netbros.com (#twksmyq) IPv6 because localhost -> ::1 is preferred on linux over ol’ 127.0.0.1

Now this is very useful.. it means when yarn is doing an HTTP request to itself its not closing the connection. that could mean a http.Response Body is not getting closed.

Oh, me too: FreeBSD, macOS, and Solaris in server environments extensively, and Linux, AIX, HP/UX, Irix, probably others I’m forgetting. Plan 9 is a whole other class of thing.

Hey, from my perspective on Plan 9, all these linuxes are the same junk.

uname; I have an account. I just don’t know how to differentiate linux especially.

@adi@twtxt.net Some linux; how does one tell which?

lagrange is a gui desktop space for browsing geminispace. it builds and runs on alpine linux! [[https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/]] #links

Setting up txtnish on the Linux side of one of my computers that runs CloudReady. #twtxt #txtnish #chromeos

#cool #linux ‘locate -r /me$’ finds all files ending in ‘/me’

I see no reason why a modern GNU Linux installation would be less appealing than windows to an average user

made a PR to the linux-surface kernel today. it’s only udev rules, but I still feel accomplished

Kali Linux Cheat Sheet for Penetration Testers - blackMORE Ops https://www.blackmoreops.com/2016/12/20/kali-linux-cheat-sheet-for-penetration-testers/

If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source | Linux Journal https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/if-software-funded-public-source-its-code-should-be-open-source

Evolution of the x86 context switch in Linux – MaiZure’s Projects http://www.maizure.org/projects/evolution_x86_context_switch_linux/index.html

Linux Sucks. Forever. - Filmed live at Linux Fest NW - April 28, 2018 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVHcdgrqbHE

GitHub - marcosptf/menuetos: fan respository - not official - os linux made with assembly language https://github.com/marcosptf/menuetos

Also pulse randomly decided that I didn’t get to have a driver for my (extremely common) sound card anymore. Jesus, systemd – you’re pushing linux on the desktop back to 1998 levels of bullshit.

Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-08-08/linux-load-averages.html

Google sponsors Linux. The Linux Foundation claims that that’s because Google loves free software. Google also continues to publish new Closed Source software. I claim that that’s because the Linux Foundation is dumb.

GitHub - tombh/texttop: A fully interactive X Linux desktop rendered in TTY and streamable over SSH https://github.com/tombh/texttop