Some time ago, Linus Torvalds made a throwaway comment that sent ripples through the Linux world. Was it perhaps time to abandon support for the now-ancient Intel 486? Developers had already abandoned the 386 in 2012, and Torvalds openly mused if the time was right to make further cuts for the benefit of modernity. It […]
Old hardware tends to get less support as the years go by, from both manufacturers and the open-source community alike. And yet, every now and then, we hear about fresh attention for an ancient device. Consider the ancient SoundBlaster sound card that first hit the market 31 years ago. [Mark] noticed that a recent update […]
In theory, writing a Linux device driver shouldn’t be that hard, but it is harder than it looks. However, using libusb, you can easily deal with USB devices from user space, which, for many purposes, is fine. [Crescentrose] didn’t know anything about writing user-space USB drivers until they wrote one and documented it for us. […]
To paraphrase an old joke: How do you know if someone is a Rust developer? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. There is a move to put Rust everywhere, even in the Linux kernel. Not going fast enough for you? Then check out Asterinas — an effort to create a Linux-compatible kernel totally in Rust. The goal […]
Theoretically when you write a GUI-based application for Linux there are standards to follow, with these all neatly documented over at the Freedesktop website. However, in reality, Freedesktop is more of a loose collection of specifications, some of which are third-party specifications that have somehow become the de facto standard. One example of this is […]
In a saga that brings to mind the hype and incidents with ReiserFS, [SavvyNik] takes us through the latest data corruption bug report and developer updates regarding the BcacheFS filesystem in the Linux kernel. Based on the bcache (block cache) cache mechanism in the Linux kernel, its author [Kent Overstreet] developed it into what is […]
It’s fair to say that there can’t be many developers who have found the need for a rotary telephone dial as a peripheral for their Linux computer, but in case you are among them you might find [Stefan Wiehler]’s kernel driver for rotary dials to be of use. It’s aimed at platforms such as systems-on-chip […]
As any Linux chat room or forum will tell you, the most powerful tool to any Linux user is a terminal emulator. Just about every program under the sun has a command line alternative, be it CAD, note taking, or web browsing. Likewise, the digital audio workstation (DAW) is the single most important tool to […]