Time to go
I am closing down this blog. Henceforth, you will find it and its continuation over on Dreamwidth . I've imported the old content. Comments, in theory, should come across in time.
Liam on Linux
Liam on Linux - LiveJournal.com
Latest posts
A small Yuletide gift
It's been a while since I have had any time to work on one of my pet projects... So, herewith, step 1 in it: a downloadable FAT32 PC-DOS 7.1 Virtualbox disk image . This is the PC DOS 2000 disk image from Connective VirtualPC – I described how I created that this time last year . I've replaced the kernel files, COMMAND.COM and a few utilities with those from the freely-downloadable PC DOS…
The vagaries of 1990s 32-bit Windows networking
I recently commented about a deeply misguided comment on HN that claimed that Windows 98 was the beginning of integrated networking in Windows. Wolfie Pauli (as I like to call him) applies: "that is not only not right, that is not even wrong!" But, to be fair, which I rarely feel the urge to be towards Microsoft, Win98 did have one killer networking feature: (effectively) unlimited IP addresses. I…
The rise of the LAN in business computing
Someone on HN claimed "the arrival of built-in Windows Networking in Windows 98" . Since that is, IMHO, "not even wrong", I felt I had to reply... This is not correct. Windows 95 had built-in networking from launch and an email client on the desktop. (It did not have a bundled web browser at launch, but it had networking including TCP/IP and dial-up.) Built-in networking arrived with Windows for…
Just because a vendor sells laptops with a Linux on, caveat emptor still applies
Some companies sell laptops with Linux pre-installed. However in some cases I have read about, there may be significant caveats. Some examples: Dell pre-installed their own drivers for Ubuntu on their laptops, and if you format the machine and reinstall, or reinstall a different distro, you can't get the source of the drivers and build your own. In other instances I've heard of, the machines work…
Some thoughts about raising the profile of Lisp
I must be mellowing in my old age (possibly as opposed to bellowing) because I have been getting praise and compliments recently on comments in various places. Don't worry, there are still people angrily shouting at me as well. This was the earlier comment, I think... There was a slightly forlorn comment in the Reddit Lisp community , talking about this article , which I much enjoyed myself: Hell…
Re-evaluating "in the beginning was the Command Line" 23 years later
A short extract of Neal Stephenson's seminal essay has been doing the rounds on HackerNews. Unix - The Hole Hawg THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS OK, fine, so let's go with it. Since my impression is that HN people are [a] xNix fans [b] often quite young therefore [c] have little exposure to other OSes, let me try to unpack what Stephenson was getting at, in context . The Hole Hawg is a…
The historical significance of DEC and the PDP-7, -8, -11 & VAX
Earlier today, I saw a link on the ClassicCmp.org mailing list to a project to re-implement the DEC VAX CPU on an FPGA. It's entitled "First new vax in ...30 years? " Someone posted it on Hackernews . One of the comments said, roughly, that they didn't see the significance and could someone "explain it like I'm a Computer Science undergrad." This is my attempt to reply... Um. Now I feel like I'm…
Mankind is a monkey with its hand in a trap, & legacy operating systems are among the bait
[Another recycled mailing list post] I was asked what options there were for blind people who wish to use Linux. The answer is simple but fairly depressing: basically every blind person I know personally or via friends of friends who is a computer user, uses Windows or Mac. There is a significant move from Windows to Mac. Younger computer users -- by which I mean people who started using computers…
Did you know that you can 100% legally get & run WordPerfect for free?
In fact, there are two free versions: one for Classic MacOS, made freeware when WordPerfect discontinued Mac support, and a native Linux version, for which Corel offered a free, fully-working, demo version. But there is a catch – of course: they're both very old and hard to run on a modern computer. I'm here to tell you how to get them and how to install and run them. WordPerfect came to…
The pros and cons of cheap Android phones — or why you don't get OS updates
I like cheap Chinese phones. I am on my 3rd now: first an iRulu Victory v3 , which came with 5.1. First 6.5" phablet I ever saw: plasticky, not very hi-res, but well under €200 and had dual SIMs, a µSD slot and a replaceable battery. No compass though. Then a PPTV King 7 , amazing device for the time, which came with 5 as well but half in Chinese. I rooted it and put CyanogenMod on it,…
Some random sketchy thoughts on Unix, web-apps and workflow
I want to get this down before I forget. I use Gmail. I even pay for Gmail, which TBH really rankles, but I filled up my inbox, I want that stuff as a searchable record (not a Zip or something), any other way of storing dozens of gigs of email means either a lot more work, or moving to other paid storage so a lot of work and paying, so paying for more storage is the least-effort strategy. I also…
The DOS and Windows drive-letter allocation process is more complex than you might think
Someone asked me if I could describe how to perform DOS memory allocation. It's not the first time, either. It's a nearly lost art. To try to illustrate that it's a non-trivial job, I decided to do something simpler: describe how DOS allocates drive letters. I have a feeling I've done this before somewhere, but I couldn't find it, so I tried writing it up as an exercise. Axioms: DOS only…
The decline and fall of A/UX
The story of why A/UX existed is simple but also strangely sad, IMHO. Apple wanted to sell to the US military, who are a huge purchaser. At that time, the US military had a policy that they would not purchase any computers which were not POSIX compliant – i.e. they had to run some form of UNIX. So, Apple did a UNIX for Macs. But Apple being what they are, they did it right – meaning…
"What We Have Lost" -- 3C talk
Wow. This is possibly the nerdiest talk I have ever seen, but it is very relevant to my own interests, especially my FOSDEM 2018 talk . The talk takes very quick looks at Symbolics Genera and OpenGenera and then compares it to Interlisp-D – or as they compare them, "west coast and east coast takes on the Lisp Machine context". That's a powerful comment right there. They draw comparisons…
Installing Linux on an old 2008 MacBook needs some workarounds & fixes
I just finished doing up an old white MacBook from 2008 (note: not MacBook Pro) for Jana's best friend, back in Brno. I hit quite a few glitches along the way. Partly for my own memory, partly in case anyone else hits them, here are the work-arounds I needed... BTW, I have left the links visible and in the text so you can see where you're going. This is intentional. Picking a distribution and…
Feel like playing with DR-DOS in VirtualBox? Have a few virtual hard disk images!
My occasional project to resurrect DR-DOS and make something vaguely useful from it continues, and in the spirit of "release early, release often", I thought that someone somewhere might enjoy having a look at some of my work-in-progress snapshots. So while there is nothing vastly new here, building a bootable DOS VM is not completely trivial without what is now some very old knowledge, so I…
EmuTOS – a new FOSS OS for the Atari ST, compatibles & emulators
Something interesting that has come out of Caldera's release of the original DR GEM code as FOSS 20 years ago, and I totally missed it... This is a great ~40min intro to EmuTOS. Nowadays there are two different all-FOSS OSes for STs, compatibles & ST emulators. I knew about AFROS and have played with it -- it's a compilation of various ST GEM enhancements and replacement modules and so on, mostly…
GNOME reinvents tabs. Hurrah! Yet another reason not to use GNOME!
Oh, so GNOME is Reinventing tabs . Oh yay! Another reason not to use GNOME! Thanks, guys! I had enough already, but every additional one makes the decision easier and easier! • Titlebars. I liked title bars. You merged them with toolbars. I don’t want that. No thank you. But it’s not a choice, it’s mandatory! Well, thanks folks, but your desktop isn’t mandatory,…
IBM PC DOS 2000 for VirtualBox
Back in December, as part of the #DOScember event across Reddit and other places, I converted the IBM PC DOS 2000 (that is, PC DOS 7.01) virtual disk that was included with Connectix (later Microsoft) VirtualPC into VirtualBox format. You can still download VirtualPC if you wish — here's the 2004 version . The final version was 2007 SP1 as far as I know. I made the PC DOS VDI available for…
What was the difference between Windows, Windows/286 & Windows/386?
EDIT : this post has attracted discussion and comments on various places, and some people are disputing its accuracy. So, I've decided to make some edits to try to clarify things. When Windows 2 was launched, there were two editions: Windows, and Windows/386. The ordinary "base" edition of Windows 2.0x ran on an XT-class computer: that is, an Intel 8088 or 8086 CPU. These chips can only directly…
On picking one of the "Languages of the Gods" -- which and why
[Another repurposed comment from the same Lobsters thread I mentioned in my previous post.] A serious answer deserved a serious response, so I slept on it, and, well, as you can see, it took some time. I don't even the excuse that "Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." If you are curious to do so, you might be amused to look…
How to choose a substrate to build on, and what foundations you need.
I'm getting some great feedback on the FOSDEM "Starting Over" talk. I will re-record it soon and put it on Youtube. A handful of people on HackerNews got it , although as expected, most didn't, or flicked through the slideshow and started arguing. There was a much more interesting set of responses on Lobsters . This post grew out of a reply to a comment there. The commenter said that they enjoyed…
"Starting Over": my FOSDEM 2021 talk
My talk should be on in about an hour and a half from when I post this. « A possible next evolutionary step for computers is persistent memory: large capacity non-volatile main memory. With a few terabytes of nonvolatile RAM, who needs an SSD any more? I will sketch out a proposal for how to build an versatile, general-purpose OS for a computer that doesn't need or use filesystems or files,…