Lunduke may be sick, but there’s still some fun Linux and retro computing news this week! (Publishing should be back to the regular schedule within the next day or two.)
Starting this week, at Vintage Computer Festival West in California, the project made it’s public debut. There is currently very little information on the website, though attendees of VCFW were able to get some hands-on time with “Prodigy Reloaded” using classic hardware and classic Prodigy software.
This is Phil Heller, the developer, showcasing Prodigy Reloaded using an IBM PS/2 and a Mac Plus.
Linux compatibility with M1 Macs has improved far enough… that Linus himself is now using a MacBook Air. And using it during the production process of the most recent Linux kernel release. Pretty darn cool.
“On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It's something I've been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it's finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for along time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now.
It's the third time I'm using Apple hardware for Linux development - I did it many years ago for powerpc development on a ppc970 machine. And then a decade+ ago when the Macbook Air was the only real thin-and-lite around. And now as an arm64 platform.
Not that I've used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But I'm trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too.”
The Nala project continues to steadily improve with the 0.11.0 release happening this week.
Nala provides a nicer looking way to utilize APT packaging — which provides faster downloads (as it can handle multiple downloads at once), and a history. It truly is worth trying out if you haven’t already. You can grab it from the project page on GitLab.
