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sohl@Sohl

September 17, 2022

#DOSweek

Here is a list of things that are not working quite right with my FreeDOS install on the Lenovo ThinkPad T440p:

1) Sound beyond PC-Speaker emulation. The motherboard chipset probably supports all kinds of synthesis and digitized sound playback, but I'll need some kind of driver to access that and make it available as a virtual SoundBlaster or similar device for older DOS software to use.

2) The default mouse driver loaded by some of the FreeDOS boot options sort of works with the built-in trackpad, but seems to randomly generate button presses when in the FreeDOS edit program, which can lead to random cursor jumps, which is really frustrating. Also in Arachne, the default pointer was almost useless with the trackpad. Plugging in a USB mouse seemed to help quite a lot, or maybe loading the mouse driver manually after other stuff loaded was helping. I may need to experiment a bit more to get stable mouse behavior. (😅 I just realized that last sentence would make me sound like a animal neurologist or something like that 60+ years ago.)

3) Arachne is rather crashy. I may need better setup of extended memory or something. I could also try Dillo and see if it is better.

4) Installing software originally shipped for multiple floppies is a bit hit or miss. The simple installers, such as for the Borland Turbo dev tools, just create a directory for you then copy the files from the multiple disks. I can, and did, do that manually from downloads that have multiple disk .img/.ima files by using Linux to mount and copy them to a flat folder on an USB stick. But some apps have installers that manipulate the files, or generate files from your setup parameters, or modify you autoexec.bat and config.sys, etc. etc. I don't know if there is a way to have FreeDOS virtualize the insertion of floppy disk images (or file sets in folders) one by one so the installer can load them as it wants and then prompt for the next one. I'd really like to get PC/GEOS GeoWorks Pro installed, but the installer is doing some stuff I don't know whether I can manually reproduce.

5) It doesn't have a Forth on it yet!!! I can fix that real quick though. 😉

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Bryan Lunduke@Lunduke

January 25, 2023

Lunduke blasted by a 9 foot tall Tesla Coil

Back in 2014, LinuxFest Northwest threw a big conference party at a place called "The Spark Museum" in Bellingham, Washington. Basically a museum of retro electronics (old radios, tv sets, and whatnot). Really cool place.

At the Spark Museum they had a 9 foot tall Tesla Coil -- which blasts out 4.6 million volts. This particular Tesla coil (one of the largest in the world) was originally owned by Cirque du Soleil... they were trying to incorporate it into a Vegas show. Legend has it someone got badly hurt (or worse) and that part of the show was scrapped.

So the Spark Museum picked that Tesla Coil up.

Then they built a big, man-sized Faraday cage that looks like something a super-villain would have, stored on his volcano island, in a steampunk novel -- complete with a battered, old-style dentist chair inside of it.

The conference organizers were given the chance to put three people inside the Faraday cage at once... and blast them with the Tesla coil.

Because I'm the luckiest darned ...

00:01:04

Bryan Lunduke@Lunduke

December 02, 2022

How to Pronounce Tech Words (part 2)

Curious how to properly say BIOS? WiFi? SCSI? GUID? SQL? Lunduke, the world's foremost authority on "saying stuff" (tm), will elucidate for you.

00:05:54

Bryan Lunduke@Lunduke

November 28, 2022

TempleOS lives on -- Forked and renamed

A quick look at the history of TempleOS — including the current forked version, known as “ZealOS”.

It’s a weird, wild ride.

00:20:22

Bryan Lunduke@Lunduke

May 30, 2023

"No Politics" - Lunduke’s Big Tech Show - May 30th, 2023 - Ep 007

Lunduke’s Big Tech Show - May 30th, 2023 - Ep 007

Doubling down on the "No Politics" rule here at Lunduke.Locals.com. And expanding an official "Code of Conduct" used here. Sorta. Kinda. 😉

Bryan Lunduke@Lunduke

May 29, 2023

"An A.I.-Free Zone" - Lunduke’s Big Tech Show - May 29th, 2023 - Ep 006

Lunduke’s Big Tech Show - May 29th, 2023 - Ep 006

I am declaring The Lunduke Journal to be an "A.I.-Free Zone". No Artificial Intelligence generated content. Period. From myself or the community.

Content for Human Nerds by Human Nerds. (tm)

Bryan Lunduke@Lunduke

May 15, 2023

"Internet bots, Fedora layoffs, & C64 Games" - Lunduke’s Big Tech Show - May 15th, 2023

Lunduke’s Big Tech Show - May 15th, 2023 - Episode 001

Topics for today’s show includes:

Taking a stand against Artificial Intelligence.
Is 47% of Internet traffic just… bots?
Fedora Linux Project Manager among the mass Red Hat layoffs.
Tech layoffs for 2023 closing in on 200,000.
Layoffs last week at Microsoft, Stack Overflow, Akamai, and LinkedIn.
Asahi Linux goes to war against Xorg. And it’s very entertaining.
A brand new game (Zeta Wing 2) released for Commodore 64.

evoblade@evoblade

2 hours ago

I feel attacked!

Vyasa@Vyasa

5 hours ago

BWAHAHAHAHOUHAHA-HAHA!
I honestly did not expect ChatGPT to fail so badly! (I will not paste any of its output, Lunduke!)
It's my first time to directly use ChatGPT. I just couldn't come up with anything I want to know that it could reliably tell me. Until today when I realised I keep receiving requests by some relatives to do a bash oneliner for some text files and I'd be offloaded if I could just tell them how to do it themselves in PowerShell but it'll be long before I've learnt what I need so I have the option to ask an RTFM-level-stupid question on StackOverflow or... to test out the great deceiver. So I sacrificed the confidentiality of my name, surname and friggin' phone number to have a go. I'll paste here just my input but you'll be well able to deduce how it went:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I want to remove duplicate whitespace from a text file on a Windows 10/11 PC. On Linux with bash what I would do is:
$ cat spacious.txt | tr -s [:space:] > compact.txt
What is the easiest way to do the same ...

Edward Willis@encw

23 hours ago

Did you become a programmer with the dream of learning all there was to know about computers?

I sure did.

That’s why I don’t understand why some “programmers” are willing to throw themselves away by replacing their own thought with AI generated code.

Isn’t every novel task an opportunity to grow one’s expertise? Even the ordinary ones help strengthen mental pathways, and you never know when you might have an epiphany. Isn’t that the whole point? Service to the art?

Bryan Lunduke@Lunduke

16 hours ago

"macOS Sucks" next weekend!

Saturday, June 10th, at 12pm Central

Just a quick reminder that "macOS Sucks" will be taking place this next weekend!

Saturday, June 10th, at Noon Central Time. That is:

10am Pacific
1pm Eastern
5pm UTC

The live video will stream only on Lunduke.Locals.com -- and will only be available to subscribers. So make sure you have full access to Lunduke.Locals.com by then!

I've been looking forward to this show for a long, long time. I have several decades worth of complaints about Mac OS (or "macOS" or whatever the heck Apple is calling it at any given moment) saved up. And I need to vent.

The live show will last roughly 1 hour and the full recording will be posted later on in the day for those who miss the live version (or simply want to watch it... repeatedly... because it's going to be awesome).

Again: Both the live and recorded version will only be available on Lunduke.Locals.com. And only for full subscribers / supporters.

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Bryan Lunduke@Lunduke

June 02, 2023

Funny Programming Pictures Part XXXV

I laughed no less than three times while putting this together. THREE TIMES I SAY.

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Bryan Lunduke@Lunduke

June 01, 2023

MkLinux: The delightfully weird PowerPC Mac Linux Distro of the 1990s

Co-Developed by Apple, with Linux running as a user-mode task. Seriously.

In 1996 -- just two years after Linux, itself, hit version 1.0 -- a version of Red Hat Linux was ported to PowerPC Macintosh computers... by Apple.

Seriously.

The very same Apple that currently opposes people running macOS on any non-sanctioned hardware -- and who fights (rather hard) to keep non-macOS systems from running on Apple hardware -- used to actively help port other systems to the Macintosh computers. My-oh-my how times have changed.

Known as MkLinux -- short for "Micro-Kernel Linux" -- the development was a joint project between Apple and "The Open Group Research Institute" in France. And it was a truly fascinating beast... because it wasn't quite your typical "Linux" system.

In fact, MkLinux really consisted of two different kernels:

"Open Group Mach" -- a variation of the Mach microkernel which had been ported to a number of platforms, including: HP PA-RISC, x86, and (of course) PowerPC Macintosh.
"Linux" -- a port of the Linux kernel itself.

What made MkLinux so strange... is that "Open Group Mach" was the lowest level kernel. It would boot the system and provide a subset of hardware access... then "Linux" would actually be run as a task within "Open Group Mach".

A user mode task, no less! Yes, in MkLinux... the "Linux" kernel is run as a standard, user-mode application!

Wild!

Over the years, MkLinux gained support for a number of different PowerPC Macintosh models (including some G3-based machines)... and, reportedly, had somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 total users before eventually being all but abandoned by Apple and moving to become a small, community project.

I have personally run MkLinux on a Power Macintosh 6100 running at 66 Mhz. Was it a speed demon? No. It felt quite a bit more sluggish than MacOS (7.x or 8.0) on the same system. But, you know what? It was a surprisingly usable Linux system! Mostly stable, and fairly high quality!

In order to preserve some of the memory of this marvelously weird Linux "distribution", what follows is a bit of a visual tour of what using MkLinux was like on PowerPC Macs of the 1990s.

The official MkLinux website (note that it was hosted by Apple itself):

As part of the installation process, you would place the Mach Kernel and bootloader into your Mac Extensions folder.

The MkLinux boot screen (a MacOS application that launched when your Mac booted... with buttons that let you choose whether to boot Mk Linux or MacOS):

The MkLinux Installer! Note this is a slightly modified version of the old Red Hat installer:

What kind of Mouse? An ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) mouse, naturally!

Screenshot from a PowerBook 1400cs/133 running a customized MkLinux DR3 (Developer Release 3) installation:

Another screenshot of MkLinux DR3:

You can find an archive of the very first release of MkLinux on Archive.org, and a great deal of in-depth details at MkLinux.org. Unfortunately, that site hasn't been udpated since 2009. Just the same, the information is historically fascinating.

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