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Lunduke Computer Operating System Status - June 21, 2024
"The Begin-inating"
June 21, 2024
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In an effort to properly document the process of creating a new Operating System / Linux Distribution, I have decided to publish a once-weekly (every Friday) Status Report for "The Lunduke Computer Operating System."

By doing this one per week, I am not flooding everyone with updates every single time some little thing gets tweaked or changed -- while still keeping folks in the loop and up to date.  Plus it makes it easy to chronicle how the development progresses.  You know.  For posterity.

I present to you, the first "Lunduke Computer Operating System Status", for June 21st, 2024.

Name & Branding

A name has been settled on!  A number of different name ideas were investigated, but none of them quite worked (many were already trademarked in the computer industry, and we didn't want to pull a Firefox).

"The Lunduke Computer Operating System" was ultimately chosen for a few key reasons:

  • It has a nice "Old-school Engineering" feel to it.  Which fits in with the design goals.
  • The name wasn't taken.
  • I like puting my name on things.  And I can.  So I did.

To go along with the name selection, a preliminary logo has been designed.

The preliminary logo.

While the logo is certain to undergo some revisions in the weeks ahead, this will serve quite nicely as the project gets underway.

The GitLab Project

The project will be using GitLab for hosting a large portion of the infrastructure:

  • Source code repository
  • Project Wiki (documentation)
  • Bug, issue, & task tracking

This has only been setup in the last day, with quite a lot of organizational work still to be done.  But this is where the project tracking, documentation, and source will live.

The Philosophy & Code of Ethics

The first two pages added to the official wiki deal with the overall project philosophy... and the Code of Ethics.

The project philosophy page contains some of the key tenets to be considered as development moves forward.  This page will need some additional details as time goes on, but will do the job for the time being.

I am quite pleased with the Code of Ethics and consider that document "complete".  This is a topic I've had a lot of time to consider, and we are learning from the mistakes of oh-so-many other projects.

New Lunduke.com

Lunduke.com has been redesigned.  It is now a simple landing page which provides key links to both The Lunduke Journal and The Lunduke Computer Operating System.  Additional links can be added as needed.

The Week Ahead

While there is, obviously, a tremendous amount of work to be done... here is what my priorities are, for The Lunduke Computer Operating System, over the next week.

  • Setup the official forum.  (We have a Discord chat server, but we need a forum.)
  • Check-in the first, very early revision of the build script.
  • Begin documenting how to setup a build and dev environment.
  • Begin onboarding the first contributor(s).  A couple at a time as we work out the kinks.

In essense: Bring up things to a state where we can have the first official contributors setup... and be a real project.  With real downloads.

Looking to Contribute?

After next week, the opportunities for contributing to the project begin to open up significantly.  The following skills will prove to be very valuable:

  • BASH Scripting
  • Debian style repository and package building
  • AppImage ISO building
  • Gambas
  • Documentation Writing & Editing (Wiki, Markdown)
  • GTK & XFCE Theme Development
  • Graphic Design (Bitmap)
  • Sound Effect Design, Music, & Foley
  • Testing

If you have skills in any of those areas... you'll have a chance to get involved.

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The Article:
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/ibm-taking-dei-under-the-radar

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Well, that settles that, then! Guess I won't be contributing to openSUSE! 🤣

Looking for the Podcast RSS feed or other links?
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4619051/lunduke-journal-link-central-tm

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https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4898317/give-the-gift-of-the-lunduke-journal

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"Andreas Kling creator of Serenity OS & Ladybird Web Browser" - Lunduke’s Big Tech Show - September 13th, 2023 - Ep 044

Update on the patching: Had a hiccup last night where the install of macOS Sequoia on the 2010 iMac failed. After sleeping on it, I remembered that I was never prompted to sign into a wifi network. Turns out the Sequoia installer didn’t pick up the AirPort card in this Mac so it wasn’t able to complete the installation updates. My router is too far to run a cable so I used my 2008 Snow Leopard MacBook as an Ethernet bridge using Internet sharing and reran the installer. Worked like a charm and I’m now booted into the Sequoia set up.

Pardon the messy desk. The last two days have been too busy for me to care about cleaning it up right now. In any event, I decided it was time to make the jump with that 2010 iMac. I’ll let you all know how it holds up.

I’m expecting some graphical issues due to this Mac predating Metal by several years (and I haven’t upgraded the GPU in it). I’m also curious to see if the USB and FireWire ports still work afterward. The USB may be fine as they’re USB 2.0, but there was a note on the OCLP documentation about Sequoia lacking USB 1.1 drivers under this particular model. Who knows though, the OpenCore Legacy Patcher team do some phenomenal work on getting hardware support fixed up with the newer OSes.

I suspect everybody here might already know, but for anybody interested, the kickstarter 3 for the ZX Spectrum Next is on and will end by mid August...
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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spectrumnext/zx-spectrum-next-issue-3-0

I know is kickstarter and all that, but the ZX Next guys have already a track record of delivering twice.

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IBM Taking DEI “Under the Radar”
Whistleblowers provide details on how IBM & Red Hat are simply renaming “Diversity” programs, as the company continues discriminatory hiring practices.

Back in April, The Lunduke Journal broke the story of IBM “ditching DEI policies” company wide — including at their subsidiary, Red Hat. This change was announced in the wake of multiple lawsuits against IBM (for their DEI policies) and executive orders against DEI from President Trump.

At the time, activist employees at Red Hat / IBM were not happy (to say the least). Encouraging and planning protests, “raising hell”, and even “killing fascists”.

But, now that a little time has passed, let’s take a look inside at IBM and see how their “ditching DEI” change is actually going.

DEI Staying “Under the Radar”

Thanks to whistleblowers within IBM, we know that employee groups focused on DEI still, in fact, exist. They are simply changing names in order to “stay under the radar” and avoid having “a target on their back”.

 

The “diversity-inclusion” corporate Slack channel, for example, is now named “inclusion-at-ibm”. They simply dropped the word “diversity”.

The DEI Department is Still There

Employees are using that IBM DEI Slack channel to clarify corporate changes to DEI policy. Which, again, thanks to whistleblowers… we have screenshots of.

A few key items:

  • The “DEI Department” has been renamed to “Inclusion” — and now reports to Kitty Chaney Reed (the Chief Leadership, Culture and Inclusion Officer).

  • IBM is no longer part of the Human Rights Campaign — “the HRC no longer align with IBM priorities”.

  • “People can still identify their preferred pronouns in all of IBM systems.”

  • The game-ified “Allyship Badge” system has been removed.

 

As we can see, some DEI policies and programs are gone, while others remain. And IBM is making a point of renaming their DEI Department within HR.

We gain these insights thanks to Ruth Davis — an IBM Executive and who currently identifies as a “DEI Advocate”.

 

These clarifications were published by a current member of the IBM HR team… who was originally hired as a “Diversity and Inclusion Intern”.

 

In short: DEI advocates continue to control IBM HR, and DEI departments continue to exist.

IBM / Red Hat Discriminatory Quotas

Up until recently, both IBM & Red Hat had discriminatory hiring policies — including sex and skin color quotas and even rewards for executives for hiring fewer white men.

We learned, as part of the original leaks supplied to The Lunduke Journal back in April, that “diversity goals are no longer part of the executive incentive program”.

 

Which begs the question, now that a few months have passed, is IBM still discriminating against White Men?

Getting hard numbers on the demographics of new IBM / Red Hat employees is not likely to happen for quite some time — if ever. But here is a picture, posted yesterday, of new Red Hat interns.

That might give us some indication of where things are heading.

 

Well. Huh.

Finding the “White Guys” in this photo of Red Hat interns isn’t quite as challenging as a round of “Where’s Waldo?”… but it’s close.

Now for me, personally, I truly don’t care what the demographic ratios are of employees & interns within a company. Hire the best people for the job, regardless of their sex or ethnicity. Meritocracy is a good thing.

That said, considering the multiple pending lawsuits against IBM and Red Hat — specifically regarding their discriminatory policies towards White Men (and their previously stated goals of hiring less of them) — it is more than a little interesting that their latest crop of Red Hat interns is almost entirely… people who are not White Men.

Results Are Mixed

There are a few good signs in here of IBM dropping DEI related policies — including no longer being involved in the Human Right Campaign and the removal of the (rather repulsive, anti-White) “Allyship Badges”.

Unfortunately, most of the rest of what we’re seeing is less encouraging.

  • “DEI” groups simply being renamed to “Inclusion” in order to stay on the right side of the law.

  • What appears to be continued discriminatory hiring at Red Hat (despite lawsuits and stated policy changes).

  • Executives and HR still heavily controlled by “DEI Advocates”.

  • Corporate systems still using “preferred pronouns”.

While making significant changes to corporate policies can take time — especially across large organizations like IBM — some of these internal reports indicate an unwillingness to drop DEI policies on the part of key IBM leadership.

The Lunduke Journal will continue keeping tabs on both IBM and Red Hat.

Any employees looking to become whistleblowers can find whistleblower resources at Lunduke.com.

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LibreOffice Developer’s Hotmail Account Locked After LibreOffice Criticizes Microsoft
“Wow that looks bad,” says Microsoft employee.

Mike Kaginski, a LibreOffice developer (who works for Collabora), has had his Microsoft-hosted email account, which he uses for open source development, locked for “activity that violates our Microsoft Services Agreement”.

 

Kaginski discovered this when attempting to send an email to the LibreOffice development mailing list (hosted by FreeDesktop). It remains unclear if that specific email (which he sent via another address and was rather bland and technical) was the reason for the ban… or if attempting to send the email was simply the first time the ban was noticed by him.

This happened just days after LibreOffice officially accused Microsoft of engaging in a “Lock-in” strategy by creating “artificially complex”, XML-based office documents.

Are the two events related? Hard to say with any certainty.

To make matters worse, Kaginski has had no success in getting Microsoft to lift his locked email account — with the company making him jump through numerous, impossible hoops (such as requiring him to sign in to submit an appeal for his account being locked… but not allowing him to sign in… because his account is locked).

You got that? Sign in to fix the account you can’t sign in with.

Gotta love a good Catch-22.

Good job, Microsoft.

The Lunduke Journal reached out to a contact, within Microsoft, who made it clear that their group was not aware of the LibreOffice Developer’s locked account, but they were aware of the LibreOffice complaint article regarding “artificially complex” XML lock-in. Adding, “wow that looks bad”.

The Lunduke Journal’s Analysis

The odds of locking a LibreOffice developer’s email account being an official Microsoft corporate decision seems highly unlikely.

Microsoft, as a company, makes a lot of bad decisions — but this would just be too stupid for words. A massive PR blunder.

But could a single employee, feeling grumpy, have done it on an impulse? As some sort of revenge for LibreOffice’s “harsh” words about Microsoft? Sure. That seems entirely plausible?

Though, it’s also entirely plausible that some poorly designed AI-driven “naughty activity” detection bot flagged his account. Or, perhaps, the developer was reported by some random Open Source hooligan who likes to cause chaos (there’s a lot of those).

Either way, the fact that Microsoft requires people to log in — on accounts which cannot log in — in order to file an “appeal” is incredibly amusing. And is very, very typical Microsoft.

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Open Source “Political Protest Forks” Thriving
Many called XLibre & Redot nothing more than “political protests” that would quickly die and be forgotten. Boy were those naysayers wrong.

Over the last year, we’ve seen a couple of high profile forks, of large Open Source projects, which were inspired — in part — by a desire to move away from the political discrimination and Leftist Extremism within the original projects.

At the time, when each of these forked projects were started, many predicted that they would go nowhere. That they were nothing more than “political protest forks” — and they would die out quickly.

Let’s check in on both of those project to see if that has happened.

XLibre - The Xorg Fork

Since officially launching, at the end of June (last month), the XLibre project has published a handful of official releases (now up to version 25.0.0.5)… with a significant number of changes and fixes.

 

In fact, considering the significant new features (such as XNamespace Extensions), the first release of XLibre is larger (in every way I can think to measure) than any Xorg release in the last decade. With the number of contributors growing.

How about Operating System support? Many predicted that XLibre would be ignored by every Linux distribution on the planet. That it would go nowhere and nobody would use it.

According to the “Are we XLibre yet?” wiki, a number of systems have already (officially) adopted XLibre. Including: Devuan, Artix, GhostBSD, and (my personal favorite) OpenMandriva.

 

This is important to note: All of that support has occurred even though XLibre has only existed for one month. Several systems already officially supporting it is nothing short of “crazy impressive”. Borderline unprecedented.

In addition, a number of systems have 3rd party repositories which allow users to install and use XLibre. Including: Arch, FreeBSD, Gentoo, NixOS, Slackware, and (seriously) macOS.

 

In short: Growing group of developers. Rapidly growing platform support. New releases which put the original project (Xorg) to shame.

Redot - The Godot Game Engine Fork

The Redot project — which forked off of Godot back in October of 2024 — had a stable release (4.3.1) back in June, and just had a new test release (4.4 Alpha 2). Both with both new features and fixes.

 

In fact, Redot has had 13 releases since the project started late last year.

With an absolutely massive number of commits since then.

 

In short: Steady, new releases. New features and bug fixes. Both stable and testing releases.

These Projects are Thriving

It’s hard to look at either of these projects and come to any conclusion other than they are absolutely thriving.

At this point, it’s looking like those who predicted rapid failure for these “Political Forks” were not only wrong… but wildly, obscenely wrong.

There’s a lesson in there.

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