Unixism: Of consoles and blinking cursors

  • Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1 Million from GitHub Founder

    From Bryan Lunduke’s blog: Why not start with a fork of Firefox is a big question. But, more engines welcome.

  • regreSSHion: OpenSSH RCE Vulnerability

    From the Wiz blog: A signal handler race condition vulnerability was discovered in OpenSSH server (sshd) affecting its default configuration. If an SSH client fails to authenticate within the LoginGraceTime period (120 seconds by default), then the SIGALRM (signal alarm) handler is called asynchronously, but some of the functions that it calls are not async-signal-safe, including syslog(). In…

  • 30 years of FreeDOS

    Andrew Cunningham writing for Ars Technica: Though it’s still being downloaded and used, shifts in PC hardware are making it more difficult to install and run FreeDOS directly on a new PC (called a “bare metal” install, to distinguish between an operating system installed directly on your PC and one that’s being run on top…

  • Larry Finger made Linux wireless work and brought others along to learn

    Staying on the theme of talking about being thankful to people taking out time to write and maintain open source software, here’s Kevin Purdy writing for Ars Technica: Writing software is one thing but a big salute for mentoring others 🫡

  • Neofetch creator archives the project and takes up farming

    I’m thankful for all open source software. Maintaining software isn’t an easy job. In the words of Philip Hazel from the LWN article How free software hijacked Philip Hazel’s life: It’s worth remembering that the effort needed to maintain a piece of successful software over its lifetime far outweighs the effort of writing it in…

  • Dealing with CentOS 7’s End of Life

    Joe Brockmeier writing for LWN: CentOS Linux 7 was first released in July 2014, and is due to go end-of-life (EOL) on June 30. By now, anyone who pays attention to such things is aware that Red Hat pulled the plug on CentOS Linux in late 2020 to be replaced by CentOS Stream instead. CentOS Linux 8 support was wound down at the end of 2021 rather than…

  • Chip powering the single use Montreal subway tickets

    From Ken Shirriff’s blog: We owe our advancement as a species to whoever turned complex manufacturing of circuits to mere printing.

  • Two ways to use an LED as a light sensor with Arduino

    From John Graham-Cumming’s blog: If the LED is reverse biased (i.e. connected to a voltage source the wrong way round) then it won’t light up but it will act as a capacitor that charges when light hits it. So the idea is to reverse bias the LED using two digital pins on the Arduino (one…

  • Using signalfd and pidfd to make signals less painful under Linux

    Anyone introduced to Unix programming gets to marvel at the clever construct of signals. In the life-cycle of a process, fortune and misfortune are present in good measure. Signals allow the operating system to tell the process about the occurrence of various events like the execution of illegal CPU instructions, a user typing and thus…

  • Getting a PDF version of the POSIX standard document

    As of writing this article, the latest POSIX standard was published in 2018. However, the confusion starts with the name itself. First off, let’s examine the many names that POSIX has. Let’s first look at what Wikipedia has to say on the subject: IEEE Std 1003.1-2017 (Revision of IEEE Std 1003.1-2008) – IEEE Standard for…