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 … 🫤
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():
container: tool for creating and running Linux containers using lightweight virtual machines on a Mac
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Radeon Software For Linux Dropping AMD’s Proprietary OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers
Direct link to upstream release notes.
50 Command Line Tools You Wish You Knew Sooner
Master the terminal with these essential commands that will transform your Linux experience from novice to power user.
[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »](https://infosecwriteups.com/50-command-line-tools-you-wis … ⌘ Read more
21 Secret Linux Commands Hackers and Sysadmins Don’t Want You to Know About
Not your usual ‘ls’ and ‘pwd’ — these are the real tools used by professionals.
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I had a lot of fun with my modems these past few days:
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SuSE Linux 6.4 and Arachne on DOS also work (with Windows 2000 as a call target):
I Learned Rust In 24 Hours To Eat Free Pizza Morally
This is a satirical tech story. For readers who prefer the text version, it’s provided below.
I Learned Rust in 24 Hours to Eat Free Pizza Morally
This is not just a story about pizza. As a recent Phoronix article explains,
the Linux Rust subsystem got into major drama because of my humble quest.
Well, here’s my side of the story, with every kernel of truth exposed.
A Moral Quest for Pizza
Des … ⌘ Read more
Harpoom: of course the Apple Network Server can be hacked into running Doom
Of course you can run Doom on a $10,000+ Apple server running IBM AIX. Of course you can. Well, you can now. Now, let’s go ahead and get the grumbling out of the way. No, the ANS is not running Linux or NetBSD. No, this is not a backport of NCommander’s AIX Doom, because that runs on AIX 4.3. The Apple Network Server could run no version of AIX later than 4.1.5 and there are substan … ⌘ Read more
WhisperD: linux voice-to-text using OpenAI whisper-1 transcription
I wrote this as an exercise to learn how to use ioctl & input devices, but I like how it turned out! It does have a hard dependency on pipewire though.
Flatpak “not being actively developed anymore”
At the Linux Application Summit (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that, by many metrics, Flatpak is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and more applications are being published in the Flathub application store, and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora. However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, a … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft unveils Microsoft’s competitor to Microsoft’s winget
One of the ways in which Windows (and macOS) trails behind the Linux and BSD world is the complete lack of centralised, standardised application management. Windows users still have to scour the web to download sketchy installers straight from the Windows 95 days, amassing a veritable collection updaters in the process, which either continuously run in the background, or annoy you with update pop-ups when you … ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.15 released
Highlights of Linux 6.15 include Rust support for hrtimer and ARMv7, a new setcpuid= boot parameter for x86 CPUs, support for sched_ext to count and report internal events, x86 Intel and AMD PMU enhancements, nested virtualization support for VGICv3 on ARM, and support for emulating FEAT_PMUv3 on Apple Silicon. ↫ Marius Nestor at 9To5Linux On top of these highlights, there’s also a ton of other changes, from the usual additions of new drivers, to better support for RISC-V, and so much more … ⌘ Read more
How I used o3 to find CVE-2025-37899, a remote zeroday vulnerability in the Linux kernel’s SMB implementation
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Linux kernel driver plugs rotary phone dial into the kernel
A Linux kernel driver that turns a rotary phone dial into an evdev input device. ↫ Stefan Wiehler The year of Linux on the desktop is finally here. Thanks to Oleksandr Natalenko for pointing this gem out. ⌘ Read more
Linux Mint forks GNOME’s Libadwaita to add theme support
On numerous occasions, we’ve talked about the issue facing non-GNOME GTK desktops, like Xfce, MATE, and Cinnamon: the popularity of Libadwaita. With more and more application developers opting for GNOME’s Libadwaita because of the desktop environment’s popularity, many popular GTK applications now look like GNOME applications instead of GTK applications, and they just don’t mesh well with traditional GTK desktops. Since … ⌘ Read more
On the relationship between Qt and KDE
Volker Hilsheimer, chief maintainer of the Qt project, says he has learned lessons from the painful Qt 5 to Qt 6 transition, the importance of Qt Bridges for using Qt from any language, and the significance of the relationship with the Linux KDE desktop. ↫ Tim Anderson at Dev Class Qt plays a significant role in the open source desktop world in particular, because it’s the framework KDE uses. Hilsheimer notes that KDE’s role in the Qt community is actual … ⌘ Read more
Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android
I recently learned something that blew my mind; you can run a full desktop Linux environment on your phone. That’s a graphical environment via X11 with real window management and compositing, Firefox comfortably playing YouTube (including working audio), and a status bar with system stats. It launches in less than a second and feels snappy. ↫ Hold the Robot In and of itself, this is a neat trick most of us are probably aware of. Running a … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft releases WSL as open source, announces CLI text editor to replace the MS-DOS Editor
Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo: Will this be Open Source? · Issue #1 · microsoft/WSL. That means that the code that powers WSL is now available … ⌘ Read more
Render a Guitar Pro score in real time on Linux
Tuxguitar is a quite powerful application written in a mixture of Java / C. It is able to render a score in real time either via Fluidsynth or via pure MIDI. The development of Tuxguitar started in 2008 on Sourceforce and after a halt in 2022, the project restarted on Github and is still actively developed. The goal of this article is to try to render a score via Tuxguitar, and various other applications connected to Tuxguitar, via Jack … ⌘ Read more
5 Linux Commands You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
In this article, I will show you five Linux commands you’ve probably never heard of. They’re simple, practical, and designed to make your…
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Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames: Control Characters (such as Newline), Leading Dashes, and Other Problems (2009, 2024)
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Accessibility on Linux sucks, but GNOME and KDE are making progress
Accessibility in the software world is a problem in general, but it’s an even bigger problem on open source desktops, as painfully highlighted by this excellent article detailing the utterly broken state of accessibility on Linux. Reading the article is soul-crushing as it starts to dawn on you just how bad the situation really is for those among us who require accessibility features, making it vir … ⌘ Read more
Expose & Explore: Discover misconfigured service protocols and ports using Linux
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the organisation responsible for managing and assigning port number … ⌘ Read more
Linux removes support for the 486, and now I’m curious what that means for Vortex86 processors
I had to dig through our extensive archive – OSNews was founded in 2007, after all – to see if we reported on it at the time, but it turns out we didn’t: in 2006, Intel announced that in 2007, it would cease production of a range of old chips, including the 386 and 486. In Product Change Notification 106013-01, Intel proclaimed these chips dead. … ⌘ Read more
Xtool: cross-platform Xcode replacement for Linux, Windows, and macOS
A few months ago I shared my Swift SDK for Darwin, which allows you to build iOS Swift Packages on Linux, amongst other things. I mentioned that a lot of work still needed to be done, such as handling codesigning, packaging, and bundling. I’m super excited to share that we’ve finally reached the point where all of these things are now possible with cross-platform, open source software. Enter, xto … ⌘ Read more
Mastering Linux Part 3: A Beginner’s Guide to APT and YUM Package Management
A Beginner’s Guide to APT and YUM Package Management
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A Penetration Tester’s Journey
Part 4 of “Beginner to Master in Linux” — A Penetration Tester’s Journey
A Must-Have Tool for Bug Hunters: Find Open Redirect Vulnerabilities on Linux
Automate open redirection detection, save hours of manual testing, and level up your bug bounty recon game.
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VectorVFS: your filesystem as a vector database
VectorVFS is a lightweight Python package that transforms your Linux filesystem into a vector database by leveraging the native VFS (Virtual File System) extended attributes. Rather than maintaining a separate index or external database, VectorVFS stores vector embeddings directly alongside each file—turning your existing directory structure into an efficient and semantically searchable embedding store. VectorVFS supports Meta’s Percepti … ⌘ Read more
How to build a fleet of networked offsite backups using Linux, WireGuard and rsync
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IBM unveils the LinuxONE Emperor 5
Following the recent release of the IBM z17 mainframe, IBM today unveiled the LinuxONE Emperor 5, which packs much of the same hardware as the z17, but focused on Linux use. Today we’re announcing IBM LinuxONE 5, performant Linux computing platform for data, applications and your trusted AI, powered by the IBM Telum II processor with built-in AI acceleration. This launch comes at a pivotal time, as technology leaders focus on three critical imperatives: enabling … ⌘ Read more