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 it’s 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.”
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 wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 isn’t 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).
“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 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 13’s — 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
