Linux, Alternative OS, & Retro Computing News - Aug 27, 2022

Date:
Sat, 27 Aug 2022 13:00:45 GMT

Description:
Linux's birthday, Windows 95's birthday, NetBSD, Zelda 3 in C++, & new Dell Linux laptop

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Lets look at the news of the week! The fun stuff. The Linux-y stuff. The funky, retro-computing stuff. The things that make us smile.

NetBSD 9.3 released

Ok. This is my bad. NetBSD 9.3 actually came out on August 6th (3 weeks ago). I read the news. Noted, mentally, that it was cool. And totally forgot to include it here.

To make up for that obvious transgression, I am putting it right at the top
of this weeks news. And there are some truly weird and wonderful updates in this release. Including wsfb-based X11 servers on the Commodore Amiga . Yeah. You read that right.

NetBSD is one of my favorite projects and just might by my favorite of the *BSDs. It has a crazy number of supported hardware platforms , and its older than both FreeBSD and OpenBSD (but not quite as old as Linux).

Aside from many bug fixes, 9.3 includes backported improvements to suspend
and resume support , various minor additions of new hardware to existing device drivers, compatibility with UDF file systems created on Windows 10 , enhanced support for newer Intel Gigabit Ethernet chipsets, better support
for new Intel and AMD Zen 3 chipsets , support for configuring connections to Wi-Fi networks using sysinst(8) , support for wsfb-based X11 servers on the Commodore Amiga , and minor performance improvements for the Xen hypervisor .

Linux turns 31 years old

Last week we saw the the 25th anniversary of GNOME and the 29th anniversary
of Debian. Well, this week the celebration parade continues! On August
25th, we celebrated the 31st anniversary of the day that Linus Torvalds announced the project that would become Linux .

Fun tidbit: Linux wasnt named Linux back then. It was named Freax combining the words Freak and X (for UNIX) by Linus. The project did not become Linux until September of 1991. Ari Lemmke uploaded the first publicly available bits from the project and Ari thought Freax was a stupid name. So he changed the name to Linux. The really great part? He didnt even ask Linus if that was ok. He just did it.

Windows 95 felt left out and had a birthday too

Just to be fair, it should also be noted that August 24th was the 27th anniversary of the launch of Windows 95. Here is a video of the launch
event. With Jay Leno. So many entertaining moments (for oh-so-many
reasons).

Zelda: Link to The Past re-implemented in C++

Ok. This isnt new at all. But I just learned about it and it is so wild, I just had to share.

Someone reverse engineered the Super Nintendo classic The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and re-implented all of it . In C++. So you can play it, via SDL, on Linux (and Windows).

Read this from the developer (its wild):

It's around 70-80kLOC of C/C++ code, and reimplements all parts of the original game. The game is playable from start to end.

You need a copy of the ROM to extract game resources (levels, images). Then once that's done, the ROM is no longer needed.

It uses the PPU and DSP implementation from LakeSnes. Additionally, it can be configured to also run the original machine code side by side. Then the RAM state is compared after each frame, to verify that the C++ implementation is correct.

Dell XPS 13 Plus gets Ubuntu pre-loaded Developer Edition

Dell released a pretty significant update to their Developer Edition (read: Linux pre-loaded) line of XPS laptops. The machine is visually quite a bit different than the previous generation of XPS 13s especially that keyboard. They ship with Ubuntu 22.04 pre-loaded, start at $1,279, and have the following specs:

12th Generation Intel Core i7 processor

Up to 32GB of memory and 2TB of storage

A 13.4 inch, FHD+, 3.5k OLED or 4K+ display

Intel Killer Wi-Fi 6E 1675 (AX211) 2x2 + Bluetooth 5.2 Wireless Card

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Link to news story: https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-alternative-os-and-retro-computing-e68


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