We’ve seen a Linux-based operating system made to run on some widely varying pieces of hardware over the years, but [Dimity Grinberg]’s latest project may be one of the most unusual. It’s a PCB with 3 integrated circuits on it which doesn’t seem too interesting at first, but what makes it special is that all […]
If you spend a lot of time at the command line, you probably have either a very basic prompt or a complex, information-dense prompt. If you are in the former camp, or you just want to improve your shell prompt, have a look at Starship. It works on the most common shells on most operating […]
You can argue if bash is a good programming language or not, but you can’t argue that it is a programming language. However, there are a few oddities about it that make it different from most other languages you probably know. For one thing, variables are dynamically scoped. Second, you can easily change variables in […]
What do you do when you need to choose an OS at boot but aren’t physically near your machine? [Dakhnod]’s inventive solution is a mix of GRUB, Wake-on-LAN (WOL), and a lightweight ESP8266 running a simple HTTP server. In the past, [dakhnod] already enlightened us with another smart ESP hack. This one’s a clever combination […]
It is a common problem: I have a USB device on a computer out in the shop, and I want to use it from the comfort of my office. What to do? Well, you could remote desktop into the distant machine. But, honestly, I always find any remote desktop more than ssh clunky and somewhat […]
The days that PDFs were the granny-proof Swiss Army knives of document sharing are definitely over, according to [vk6]. He has managed to pull off the ultimate mind-bender: running Linux inside a PDF file. Yep, you read that right. A full Linux distro chugging along in a virtual machine all encapsulated within a document. Just […]
[Jim Colabro] is a little underwhelmed with the experience of low-level debugging of Linux applications using traditional debuggers such as GDB and LLDB. These programs have been around for a long time, developing alongside Linux and other UNIX-like OSs, and are still solidly in the CLI domain. Fed up with the lack of data structure […]
We see many 16-bit retrocomputers around here based on Intel and Intel-like chips such as the 8086, 8088, V20, and similar. While they don’t seem very powerful by today’s standards, they were perfectly capable machines and, thanks to Elks (Embeddedable Linux Kernel Subset), you can run something fairly Linux-like on these devices. The requirements are […]
One of the longest running jokes in our sphere is that the coming year will finally be the year of “Linux on the Desktop.” Never mind that the erosion of the traditional Windows-style desktop form of computing is a thing, or that Linux-derived operating systems such as Android or Chrome OS are running on literally […]