Posts by Liam Proven

Both Fedora and Ubuntu will get AI support – soon

Re: oh Phew...

> P.S. @Liam -- Follow your articles - good stuff!

Thanks very much! :-)

> is not available on the *BSDs

Such as?

Allegedly, the FreeBSD Linuxulator is good enough that these days you can just run server-side stuff using Podman's docker commands, and it should just work. I have not tested this as so far I do not have FreeBSD in daily desktop use. (But I'm considering it ever more strongly...)

Re: oh Phew...

> a non-systemD, non-snap and non-forced-on-me-AI distro.

Enquiring minds want to know which one.

Re: Is it a headline? Uh no, it's a quote...

> Is it a headline? Uh no, it's a quote...

To be perfectly honest that was me experimenting with formatting options -- and it looks like the editors have changed it now. Sorry about that.

macOS 27 threatens to bury Time Capsule, FOSS brings a shovel

Re: Actually, it's not a bad thing - disks age.

> spinning rust of that age cannot be that reliable anymore.

I specifically linked to how to replace the disks to address that point.

But you know what, if there is one way to keep an old spinning HDD in the best condition it can be, it's to put it in a separate box that doesn't get moved around, doesn't get vibrated by speakers, doesn't get turned off, and so cool down, and then turned on, and so heat up.

It's a lightly-used low-load drive in a box on a shelf that stays on from one decade to the next.

Which is exactly what these are.

Re: How difficult would it be for them to maintain AFP support??

> How difficult would it be for them to maintain AFP support??

Difficult? Not very.

But it's very old and long-obsolete and the stuff it did that used to matter, like preserving data forks and resource forks on files saved on network drives, don't matter any more. The original apps that this mattered to went away with 10.5 Leopard which dropped the Classic MacOS VM. Then 10.6 would not run on PowerPC (but ran PowerPC native-OS-X apps). Then 10.7 dropped support for PowerPC binaries.

Some of the apps kept ancient data file formats for years but they have gone now too.

Now x86 support is going away, and quite possibly, even x86 _app_ support. It will be all Arm-native apps and they don't care about the 20th century Mac stuff.

Some printers did but who uses a 20+ year old laser printer now?

Apple keeps moving the state of the art of its own OS forward because it aggressively drops old tech. I don't always like it but I respect it.

This weekend I got a warning from Chrome that I'm getting no more updates because macOS 11 is too old. I need macOS 13 but my iMac maxes out at 11.

So now I _must_ do lots of backups and then learn the OCLP dance... but the writing is on the wall. I think I am in the market for a new Mac and I don't want an Arm one, because I run x86 Linux VMs all the time. (And other OSes sometimes.)

The abandoning of legacy tech is both a pain and also why Apple puts out a new OS release every year and it's still not in the terabyte range.

Whereas Win11 is a nightmare: MS knows the gig is up and so it's leaning hard into monetising everything it can. Mandatory bloat, mandatory spyware, mandatory adverts, mandatory uncancellable nags to buy more cloud space.

MS should have done what Apple is doing a decade ago.

Vista: 64-bit only.

8: UEFI only.

10: no Win32 support.

Force the pace of updates. Charge for extended support of the obsolete stuff.

And that would have made the Linux folks happy, too. ;-)

Re: 900 KB of available disk space – less than 1 MB

Thank you!

> to making sure making things easier came with a recurrent subscription fee.

Not fair.

Sure, it does, but so do all commercial OSes now.

The thing is, if you are cursed with Win11, you can't turn off all this crap. I have a freebie Hotmail account from about 1995 or 1996 and some pittance of free disk space on OneDrive as a result, and Win11 wants to store all my home directory files on it, and back up to it, and every log on I get nagged to buy more, and use Teams, and use Copilot, and all the other upselling CANNOT BE DISABLED.

The company that came up with the simple brilliance of a checkbox that said "Do not ask again" and made a thousand small GUI annoyances go away doesn't give you that option.

I have a similar aged Apple account, with no payment method, and no space to speak of. I don't use iTunes or iPhoto or any of that stuff. I don't have an iPhone or Apple bloody Watch or Apple TV, I have no subs to anything, I run FOSS and freeware and pay no feeds to anyone. And it NEVER COMPLAINS. No nags, no reminders, nothing.

As ever the trouble is Windows-lickers who can't imagine anything else and when they are told that it is Not Like That on other platforms, they call you a liar and a fanboy and a cultist.

I've never bought a new Apple product in my life and I doubt I ever will. It's all used kit, bought cheap or free, and upgraded by me by hand with 2nd hand bits, and it all works a treat.

I just found my 15YO freebie cast-off iBook G4 in a box in Prague last month. For some reason I packed it away with a PowerBook PSU that doesn't fit. Who knows why. I don't have a PowerBook that takes a Yoyo PSU and never did, although I've fixed a couple.

I bought a 2nd hand iBook PSU locally, so zero shipping fees -- I walked -- and it boots and it runs. Next I will replace its reed switch (a £15 part with postage), and crowbar MacOS 9.2.2 onto it, and you will probably read about it on El Reg soon.

You don't have to be a sucker or a fashion victim to use Apple kit. You can be a cheapskate FOSS freeloader. It works great.

Re: 900 KB of available disk space – less than 1 MB

> All these years and I thought it was more!

As in, less than 1 meg, not less than a gig. Sheesh.

> Time Machine hasn't worked properly over a network for the past decade.

Absolutely categorically _bollocks_.

My iMac and my MacBook Air both back up over the network to my two TrueNAS servers.

Both are on ZFS RAID on TrueNAS Core, the last FreeBSD version. Works great. The older OS backs up over AFP, the newer one over SMB, but both work absolutely fine.

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Re: "Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space ... unless you opted out."

> I've at least attempted to disable on my Ubuntu 26.04 installation

Like I wrote, I have not tried it because I didn't have it, but reports online say that if you remove it, it re-downloads it. And no, leaving an empty file there doesn't stop it. Making it read-only doesn't either.

That's why I linked to methods to _tell Chrome not to do it_ rather than OS-level attempts to block it.

Firefox integrates an ad-blocker, but not to block ads

Re: Design?

> However, some El Reg regs gave me a few choice details on why Brave ISNT the most ethical choice for a browser

>

> https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

That would be me, here:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/04/03/zorin-os-173-takes-brave-step-of-changing-default-browser/379741

Also, do note the follow-up to the link you cited, by another author:

https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/

Update: the Rust adblock manager addon is a temporary one, and when I restarted Firefox this morning, it was automatically removed and µBlock Origin reinstated. :-)

GNOME may rule Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon, but X.org isn't roadkill yet

> I rather like the MATE desktop with Debian

This is part of why I wrote this article:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/01/09/debian-goes-retro-with-a-spatial-desktop-that-time-forgot/4284791

Re: Just for curious

> I am sure that will not work in Wayland.

I agree. I am 100% sure it won't, too.

I believe you have mentioned this before. For me it's a good example of the diversity of preferences Linux enables, as that sounds like a usability nightmare to me! :-)

There is a new MATE. Now, with Ubuntu 26.04, I think it is probably in Ubuntu's LTS repos. When Mint releases a version based on Ubuntu 26.04.1 -- planned to be in December -- I think you will get MATE 1.24 and support and updates until 2031 or so. That is probably your best hope right now.

> I was surprised to actually notice that Firefox does not ship anything that is not Windows/Linux/Mac

You mean _Mozilla_ does not ship. But yes, that is correct.

All the big 3 BSDs maintain their own versions of Firefox and you can get native packages from them. Mozilla does not just distribute binaries, it distributes source code -- unlike Google -- and so the BSDs maintain their own ports.

Re: "work habits may need to be adjusted"

> Or perhaps choice of distribution needs to be adjusted.

>

> There are plenty of ways to easily get an excellent desktop OS without GNOME or Wayland.

Well, yes.

But part of what I wanted to do here was spell out clearly that you do not need to switch _distributions_ in order to avoid GNOME and Wayland if you do not want them. I do not want them myself.

Sadly, right now, I know of no distro that would suit my iMac well, because 1 of my twin 27" screens has 4x as many pixels as the other. All the desktops I like use X11 and X11 can't handle that well. Wayland does it fine, but there are no Wayland environments I actually like using... yet, anyway.

> Wondering what that makes Arch, Gentoo …

Hard to answer without resorting to parody. You know the kind, old ones like:

• Linux Airlines, you walk onto the tarmac and there's a pile of components.

• Linux birthday cake: flour, eggs, butter, milk, sugar; "some assembly required".

I _like_ assembling IKEA stuff. I find it fun, like a 3D puzzle but at the end, it's something you can use, unlike a jigsaw.

Whereas Arch et al are more like: right, you have wood, nails, glue; we are giving you tools and instructions; now get sawing and hammering. It's not a ready-made kit, easy for non-specialists to assemble; it's a pile of components and you're meant to build your own, learning and customising as you go.

With IKEA you get no choice of how it goes together: it's right or it's wrong.

With Gentoo, it's your choice of how it looks, what you make: bookcase or table or skateboard.

> I'd be more inclined to grant that accolade to Mint, but I guess YMMV.

Mint _is_ Ubuntu, with a different look and Flatpak in place of Snap.

So is Zorin. So is Pop OS, and Asmi, and Linux Lite.

But Ubuntu is not Debian. You may have to do some work to find a single file that is exactly the same, unmodified.

That is why there is an LMDE, and why there _can_ be.

Back to IKEA: I've owned a few Billy bookcases (and a _tonne_ of Ivar.)

I made a Billy into a CD rack because I had quite a lot of CDs. I bought a load more shelves and supporting pegs and installed them so close only CDs would fit. (There aren't enough holes, so some shelves ended up more widely-spaced. I used those for DVDs, of which I didn't have many.)

It was a 6' tall CD rack that held circa a thousand CDs & DVDs. It was mine, "designed" and built.

But you know what? It was still immediately recognisable as a Billy bookcase. I didn't re-engineer it. I just tweaked it.

Mint, Zorin, etc.: they are still recognisably Ubuntu LTS with a lot of cosmetic surgery.

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

> Something funny going on with the screenshots in the article: some pixels being cropped top and bottom?

>

> E.G. Gnome flashback has lost its top and bottom panels.

Yes, I saw that too, but it looks to me like it's now been fixed.

> (This is on a poor man's 1366x768 museum thinkpad)

I have and use a couple of those, too. :-)

But it was happening on my biggest (27") screen as well. Now, AFAICS, fixed.

> I cannot fathom why it is considered difficult.

*shrug* You do you.

Debian is usually quite a _lot_ more work -- and since the components are already old at launch, by a year or so later, they're ancient.

It comes with an old ESR, when most people want a current browser. Most of us need proprietary freeware like Ferdium, Slack, maybe Teams or Whatsapp or something, Signal and so on. For most people that probably means installing Flatpak and then having 2 update mechanisms -- and of course vast app footprints.

If someone's kit needs special drivers, they have to work out what and find them and install them. Ubuntu provides tools to work out what drivers a given PC needs and install them, rather than the DIY approach.

I do use it, but mainly in server type roles (and there the absence of ZFS becomes a pain).

Debian is the IKEA flatpak of distros: some assembly required, and may have rough edges if you lack skills in that department.

Ubuntu is as close as PCs get to Mac-style "just works".

Re: Just for curious

> At least with Mint I get to keep - for the moment, at least - the X

You get to keep X11 with both. Cinnamon on both Mint and Ubuntu remains X11 by default.

Why is there an Ubuntu remix? Because Joshua Peisach wanted one.

I wrote about it when it went official:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2023/03/30/its-official-ubuntu-cinnamon-remix-has-been-voted-in/370213

He met all the terms to be an official remix -- Cinnamon is in the repos, it hit the release targets, and so on -- so now it's official.

Cinnamon is based on GNOME 3.x tech, and that does confer advantages as well as disadvantages. The GNOME 3 rendering model means that it can do fractional scaling. If you have a HiDPI screen, but maybe one that isn't _very_ high-res, you can set the scaling to 125% or 150% and it rescales smoothly to that size. MATE and Xfce can't easily do that. Xfce does it by changing the screen resolution, which works, but it means everything gets fuzzy.

The thing is that no matter how much you love MATE or something, if it's too small to read, you can't really use it. I don't own any such high-res kit here but the 2 newest laptops from SitPub both have fairly high-DPI screens. They are 4-5YO and non-scalable desktops are just about usable but make me squint a bit. They're much comfier at 110% or 125% but 150% is too big and at 200% everything gets clownishly giant.

Suddenly Cinnamon makes sense here: it's pretty customisable, but it also scales better.

And if the desktop has a global scaling factor then that applies to all compliant apps, as well.

It is possible to do this kind of thing with a calculator and some very editing of X.org config files, but it's a lot harder!

Re: there's no place like GNOME

Lene Lovich. Nice. Approved.

I like the footnote about pronouncing Xfce, too.

Me, I think it should probably go back to XForms, like in 1996... Or at least FLTK, or "full tick" as I learned it was meant to be pronounced when I wrote a story on it.

https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/11/26/fltk-14-it-now-speaks-wayland-and-has-better-hidpi-support/315261

Re: I expect this comment will be deleted

> But for the love of God can we have a "revert to previous layout" option for El Reg please ?

Great things are afoot. Big. Huge.

The relevant people are working on it, very hard. Do not be afraid.

In other words, yeah, we know, we're on it.

Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone

> quite a few UK citizens who are entitled to Irish passports

Well quite. Including me. And when I got one, I let the British one expire.

Which I explained at length to Nationwide, but the crappy web-app it licensed only understands UK ones.

Nationwide wanted ID for this rotten broken verification tool which account holders are not required to have.

Its response: "well go into your local branch." The problem being that HQ closed that in 2018 and the next nearest ones are 3-4 hours on a ferry or a £250 air fare away. I asked if it was paying. It declined.

So I lost an account I'd had since 1986.

The Apple age-verification thing was only a footnote. I think my iThingy-toting mates told me that it won't take passports and wants card-sized ID: national ID cards, which of course Brits don't have, or driving licences, which a lot of people choose not to have -- I got my car licence at 38, although I had a bike licence by 21 or so.

Microsoft opens door to the past by releasing 86-DOS and PC-DOS 1.00

Re: DOS 4

> What was the mistake?

Well, some of us remember DOS 4 and would say that DOS 4 _itself_ was a mistake...

> Since the MS ripping off CP/M argument is settled, it's time to start another argument which will go on for decades...

Coo, is it? Cool. Apparently I am now a Voice of Authority and can settle half-century old arguments. Nice.

> MS didn't rip off CP/M but they did rip off DR DOS 5.0 and 6.0. Discuss.

Well, yes... but then the big innovation in DR-DOS 5 was integrating an extended/expanded/upper memory manager of the type that was selling well as 3rd party products like Quarterdeck's QEMM386 and Qualitas' 386Max.

In other words it wasn't a technology rip-off. MS ripped off DR's bundling tactic.

DR saw that there were a bunch of addons for DOS that by 1990 or so were damned near essential, so you could actually use your 386SX's 2MB or even 4MB of RAM to benefit DOS and DOS apps.

• a MOVE command (cf. Norton, 4DOS)

• a full-screen editor (loads of 'em, from Brief on upwards)

• a GUI file manager (Xtree, Norton Commander, whatever)

• a GUI app launcher (legions of shareware things)

• a multitasker (dangerous ground, easy to get wrong, limits compatibility, but oh so handy for power users) -- cf. DESQview

• a disk cache (cf. Smartdrv)

• CD drivers

• mouse drivers

And critically if you had all these and you loaded them all you then had so little base memory left you couldn't run anything any more. So biggest of all you *needed*…

• a memory manager

DR did much of this in-house and raided its spares bin. ViewMAX came from a cut-down GEM. TaskMax and other bits came from Concurrent DOS, indirectly.

It gave you a better DOS, which did more, and left you with _more_ free memory, and it bundled about $500 of addons and utilities but cost $240.

MS copied the move, 100% yes, no argument. It added nothing material, but it was Official and it was From Microsoft, and it was $99 as an upgrade. But of course you already had DOS!

DR upped the ante by bundling disk compression from SuperStor.

MS did the same.

[[Aside: MS nicked the code.

It invited all the leading vendors in for assessment, including STAC who did Stacker, the market leader.

It basically took code, bundled a cut-down version, and told the vendors they could sell upgrades and updates. Central Point (makers of PC-Tools) bit, the fools. They donated MS Antivirus and MS Backup. They made the square root of feck all, of course. Went bankrupt.

STAC looked at the deal and told MS to feck off.

MS took the code and used it anyway, combined with code from Vertisoft's DoubleDisk.

STAC found out, sued, and won. It made about $250M. It spent it on buying ReachOut and moving into remote control tech. Smart but not enough and it died.

MS rewrote that bit and got away with it.

]]

DR got bought by Novell and it upped the ante again by bundling peer-to-peer networking.

MS responded with Windows for Workgroups, which did the same but ran the network stack as a Windows process so it didn't pummel your base memory.

Then it bundled DOS with Windows to create Win95 and it was game over for selling DOS, as the infant Reg reported in about 1999.

https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/05/win95_is_it_just_dos/

https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/

> And wasn't CP/M itself inspired by DEC's RT-11?

Close but no cigar. Have a shandy.

It was inspired by a DEC OS, but an older one than RT-11. That came out in 1973 for the PDP-11 (launched 1970). RT-11 was too late: CP/M first appeared just the next year.

The PDP-11 was DEC's first 16-bit machine, I think. The effects of IBM's System/360 were starting to be felt and the 8-bit byte was becoming the industry standard, and machines with a bit width of a multiple of 8 were starting to take over. This is the _same trend_ that created the Intel 4004, 8008, and 8080. In other words, the PDP-11 is too late, and we need to look further back, for something Gary Kildall might have used the previous decade, or which would have become cheap enough to give to a temp or a student at the end of the 1960s or the very start of the 1970s.

The OS/2 Museum did the detective work:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-backslash-as-path-separator/

The command language of CP/M, and DOS, and Windows NT, is inspired by and in many placed taken directly from the OS of the PDP-6 (1963) and PDP-10 (1966).

The OS was renamed TOPS-10 in 1970, but it was already at least 6 years old then; before that it was just called MONITOR. (A bit like MacOS did not originally have a name... it was just the Macintosh's "System", as it was until System 6 and System 7. The "MacOS" branding began around 7.5 or 7.6.)

Part of the evidence is that CP/M has the PIP command instead of COPY/MOVE etc. PIP is older than TOPS-10.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Interchange_Program

As for CP/M's design, it's more akin to DEC OS/8 in its extremely simplicity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/8

And guess what... OS/8 used PIP.

> includes CP/M headers

It's not based on CP/M code. It doesn't use CP/M filesystems. It's based on public APIs and that's perfectly reasonable fair use, especially when the company who published them is several _years_ late on delivering the new OS.

https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/the-late-arrival-of-16-bit-cpm

I have written about this at length:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/12/why_cpm86_was_late/

The proof is very simple: CP/M was written in a high-level compiled language, PL/M. DOS was hand-coded in 8086 assembly language, and used the existing FAT filesystem from Microsoft Disk BASIC.

If SCP had source, it would have been _easier_ to recompile it for a whole new CPU, but it didn't. Tim Paterson wrote it from scratch.

And it's not the only OS he wrote. He also wrote MSX-DOS for Microsoft. That's the DOS for MSX computers with disk drives. It natively runs CP/M binaries, but uses MS-DOS commands and the MS-DOS filesystem, FAT12.

The point being that CP/M was very small and very simple.

Lots of companies cloned CP/M.

Cromemco had CDOS. (Remarkably its Greek division is still going.) Epson TPM-II and TPM-III. Husky DEMOS. Elan IS-DOS. Videoton VT-DOS. Tiki Data K/PM, later renamed TIKO.

The SAM Coupé came with ProDOS, a 3rd party CP/M compatible.

There's a modern FOSS one, CPMish:

https://cowlark.com/cpmish/

CP/M was so small and so simple, everyone did it. It's just that one company got very rich and very famous with the CP/M clone it bought in, and the rest didn't.

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

Re: I'm confused why...

> registered in the UK

Excuuuuuuuse me.

Canonical Ltd

1 Circular Road

Douglas, Isle Of Man

IM1 1AF

Not in the UK at all. About 100km across the sea from the nearest bits of the UK, in fact.

Although on a clear day, from here in the office of the Irish Sea wing of Vulture Towers -- 600 metres from the official Canonical address -- I can see the hilltops of the Lake District.

Today is _not_ a clear day.

Fedora 44 is out – countless versions of it

> Too much Wayland-only for my tastes

Just as in Ubuntu, if you install one of the alternative spins, you still get X.org.

Xfce, LXDE, LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE, Sugar, and i3 -- all use X11.

Re: Fedora 44 And EXT4

> Why not install from a booted live image?

I do not understand what difference you mean.

Here is the official Fedora 44 GNOME downloads page:

https://fedoraproject.org/workstation/download/

There is only 1 option for x86-64: an ISO file. That _is_ a live image. There is no other way to get it or install it on an x86 machine. You write the image to some physical media, or in this case point the hypervisor at it, boot from it, and you are in a live desktop environment. Then one of the app icons is the installation program.

Re: Fedora 44 And EXT4

> configure it outside the installer using whatever tool you like, then just assign the mount points in the installer

Historically, in previous versions of Fedora, this was _still_ way too hard.

This is what got me dismissed from RH before the end of my probation, you know. I couldn't pick an existing partition for `/home`. I filed a bug. It was closed WONTFIX. I traced the dev; he was 2 floors down from me in the same building. I went and found him and explained. He maintained: we do not dual boot, because servers do not dual boot; we don't care; we will not fix this. I started a memo-list thread about doing competitive analysis compared to other distros and fixing the many rough spots. It turned into a massive flamewar and I got let go.

The bug was indeed fixed later anyway.

This was already a problem in Fedora 17 or so, and >25 versions later it is if anything _worse_.

I implore the Fedora team to look at other distros, see how this can be done, and learn.

Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon spits out Xorg, but still lets you run X11 apps

Re: Resolute Raccoon

> Hopefully it resolves to stay well away from I-684 and the family car of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I had to do some Googling to understand this, but now I do. :-D

> it is an option in Kubuntu.

Small update to this: I am testing Kubuntu today, and when I said it was an option, I should have been more specific.

The Plasma X11 session is no longer installed by default. As shipped, Kubuntu 26.04 is Wayland-only. _However_ the optional X11 KDE session is still available in the repositories, so you can manually install it and then you can log in via X.org.

I have yet to test this, but I am working on it.

Re: Well that's a hard no....

> due to the idiocy of removing X11

They did not.

GNOME 50 removed the X11 session. The default Ubuntu graphical edition uses GNOME 50. *ONLY* the GNOME and Budgie editions enforce Wayland. All the other 8 GUI editions offer X.org as the display server.

Xfce, LXDE, KDE, Unity, Cinnamon: all use X.org.

> (hence no X11 only Mate desktop)

Also wrong.

The Ubuntu MATE maintainer quit. Nobody else stepped up yet. That's why no MATE remix.

I think, like Unity, it will be back.

> Ubuntu and any version of Linux that FORCES me to run Wayland is non-existent as far as I'm concerned

*ONLY* GNOME and Budgie make it mandatory.

It is option in Kubuntu, and all the other flavours are based on X.org.

> I would have very much preferred that the Xorg option had stayed

Xorg is the display server for Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Unity, and Ubuntu Cinnamon; it is an option in Kubuntu.

More ancient Linux device support faces the chop

> So it didn't arrive until Win98 and Win2000Pro?

Others have clarified this well, but yes, broadly. It didn't arrive *AT RETAIL* 'til Win98 and Win2K.

Windows 95 as shipped did not include FAT32, or USB, or a web browser.

OEM Service Release 1 added Internet Explorer.

OSR 2 added FAT32 and USB and IE2.

OSR 2.1 added IE3.

OSR 2.5 added IE4.

But the point is, you couldn't buy them and there was no documented official way to upgrade: they were clean-install only releases. A big hindrance was that there was no way to convert a FAT16 drive to FAT32. (Except PartitionMagic!)

NT4 never supported FAT32 or USB. At all. There were 3rd party efforts to add them on.

Only with Win98 could you go buy something that would upgrade your PC.

You could of course at first _buy_ the Plus Pack to get IE, and later, download it for free.

I worked at PC Pro magazine and Microsoft let us put the IE installers on our cover CD. We asked Netscape for Navigator or Communicator. It said no. It wanted direct downloads so it could track adoption.

My editor attempted to explain that it was an expensive download. The Californians didn't get it. I (as de facto technical editor) had to spent half an hour on the phone to the West Coast explaining to profoundly ignorant Netscape staffers -- progressively more senior ones as the call progressed -- that in Europe, local calls were metered, and so dial up internet access cost money. They had no idea. They just assumed everywhere worked like the US. They kept insisting I was wrong because calling your ISP was a local call and they were free, and that I did not understand that users were not phoning Netscape internationally to download the browser.

I had to keep explaining, in less and less tech detail, that in the UK and Ireland WE PAID FOR LOCAL CALLS and that meant were were PAYING TO CONNECT TO OUR I.S.P.

When it finally got through to them it blew their minds. There was shouting and scurrying and calls to get board members into this meeting NOW NOW NOW we don't CARE what they are doing WE NEED THEM HERE *NOW*.

By the end of the call, they understood, and were terrified and now realised why MS allowed physical media distribution and why we ran cover disks and why shareware didn't work in Europe and why there were so few downloads.

By the next day we had permission from a deeply shaken and scared Netscape Inc. to put both Netscape Navigator (the browser-only product) and Netscape Communicator (the full fat client with email, address book, calendar, and web page editor) on our cover CD.

> I'm still confused by your used of "IP", both here and in the article. Was it a shortcut for "IP over Ethernet"

No. It's a shorthand for TCP/IP.

I know that TCP/IP is a network protocol and ATM is not -- it's also a hardware spec as well as software -- but that's the nature of the computer world. Sometimes radically different technologies that do different things end up competing.

The OSI 7-layer model was always a work of idealised fiction. Real systems gaily switched or merged or omitted layers.

Before TCP/IP came to the desktop, different OSes used on business and organisational and educational LANs all ran different protocols. OS/2, DOS and 16-bit Windows tended to use NetBEUI. Novell setups used IPX/SPX. Macs used AppleTalk. Acorns used Econet. Banyan VINES used XNS. HP printer servers used DLC. Etc. etc.

Some used RS432, some ArcNet, some their own standards.

But gradually most shifted to 10Mb/s Ethernet as a lowest-common-denominator, cheap enough good enough physical transport for small LANs. IBM shops used Token Ring but while it scaled better it was slower _and_ more expensive.

So ATM was competing against ($WHATEVER protocol over 10Mb/s Ethernet).

However fragile 10base-2 coax Ethernet switched to more resilient, physical star architecture, 10base-T UTP Ethernet. Once all the cables plug into a passive hub it becomes easy to upgrade just that grey box to a switch. Suddenly Ethernet's scaling problems were alleviated. Very soon afterwards, within a few years, 100base-T UTP Ethernet started spreading. With switches it scaled all right, and switches fell in price rapidly.

ATM tried to do the whole stack, from your PC to the wall to the LAN to the WAN to the MAN, hardware and cabling and software.

It was competing against a whole thriving incestuous cannibalistic mob of software standards and cabling standards.

The point being that this kind of environment, with competition and rival pricing, drove evolution faster than rigidly controlled vendor standards.

As plain old cheap switched Ethernet over cheap UTP got good enough and cheaper than anything else, the WWW and Internet standards-based email took off. All those other protocols gradually got TCP/IP added as well, and then the proprietary protocols faded away, and by about a decade after Windows for Workgroups brought both client-server and peer-to-peer networking to the industry standard PC client OS, all the other protocols had largely gone away, replaced by IPv4. On LANs over Fast Ethernet. On WANs over ADSL and SONET backhaul.

ATM was something built by and for voice telephony companies envisioning dedicated data services like videophones and things: making a big switched point-to-point packetised network that scaled down to the desktop.

Its backers didn't realise they weren't competing with any one system or standard, but a hodgepodge of whatever was cheapest and easiest and just did the job... as the list of jobs shrank down to one lowest-common-denominator system that ran whatever else layered over the top in software.

So, yes, IP means just the software protocol, the visible layer of a whole mishmash of stuff that interconnected Fast Ethernet IPv4 LANs over messy bodged links carried over phone lines and NAT.

It's as good a label as any. There isn't really a better.

> ATM isn't a competitor of TCP/IP.

It was pushed as the primary mechanism for WAN and MAN comms in the late 1990s, and it not only competed with everything from ISDN to ADSL to SONET, it also competed with network protocols like TCP/IP.

Example:

https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/16/cable_wireless_unveils_1_billion/

> At some point, it was touted as an Ethernet competitor for LAN,

It was but not only that. It aimed to be the entire network, from LAN to metropolitan area.

When IP started to fight back it was headline news:

https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/17/ip_to_displace_atm_says/

Sorry, but you remember it totally wrong. ATM *was* the future of networking. All wired networking.

> a dual-port Xircom PCMCIA card

Xircom did some amazing stuff.

The RealPort cards worked either way up and you could fit a pair at once.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/273777849904

And no dongles -- full size ports on a card a few mm thick.

Its Portstation modular USB dock let you add and remove ports ad lib.

https://docs.rs-online.com/8350/0900766b8002d629.pdf

And it even offered USB drivers for Windows NT 4, which did not support USB at all!

Linux may get a hall pass from one state age-check bill, but Congress plays hall monitor

> I'm hoping (assuming?!) the last paragraph is some kind of in-joke or veiled commentary. I haven't followed El Reg in many a year; maybe I'm missing the context. If not, it's a truly baffling take.

I am mystified how you could be baffled by it.

Over on Mastodon -- you know, the social network that's actually free as in speech -- that in particular was singled out for praise:

https://mastodon.scot/@withaveeay/116453366915907902

«

Very sweet last two paragraphs, Liam.

»

https://mastodon.scot/@FaithfullJohn/116453473679022741

«

+1 I was going to say that too! :smile: :applause:

»

I am strongly in favour of free speech, but I am not in favour of anonymity.

I have been online since 1985 and had my own paid email address since 1991. I always use my real name everywhere.

If you want to say it, then stand by it. Everyone who wants to publish their opinions to the internet at large for all to see should be subject to the same responsibility that a professional outlet such as El Reg, same as a newspaper or anything else.

If you are not willing to say it under your real name, then don't say it.

Publishing to the public is not the same as private person-to-person comms. I am happy for those to remain secret and private and protected. But if you want to speak to the world at large, then stand up to do it.

The 21st century belief that using pseudonyms protects you in some way is risible nonsense. It was a disastrously stupid idea in the first place, and its result has been epic amounts of disinformation, much of it backed by Russia, which is too poor to afford a modern military but worked out decades ago that internet psyops are both cheap and effective.

IMHO Brexit was the result of Russian disinformation campaigns. It was certainly funded by Russian money.

E.g.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/how-arron-banks-campaign-ambassador-jim-mellon-made-millions-in-russia-nigel-farage/

https://www.opendemocracy.net/what-we-learned-about-arron-banks-at-fake-news-inquiry/

I also strongly think that both times Trump got elected, Russia helped: it's behind MAGA, Qanon, as well as the antivaxxers and lots of other toxic internet lies.

It is strongly in Russia's favour to weaken the EU, weaken NATO, elect weak corrupt leaders of superpowers, and so on, and unregulated, uncontrolled social networks have misled hundreds of millions of people... many of whom vote.

If the price of getting rid of this is getting rid of social networks, and turning them into tightly-controlled venues where real names are enforced, then bring it on.

A common argument against this is to point out that people in persecuted minorities, of persecuted religions or ethnicities or sexualities or whatever, would lose their freedom of speech. I do not think that preserving the right of people to lie or conceal their identity when publishing to the world is more important than preserving democracy and free countries. If the price of blocking disinformation is some minorities' freedom to anonymously post publicly, that is a price worth paying.

Re: Putting social networks out of business

> But it would definitely put a lot of small social networks, small hobby sites out of business.

No, I don't think so.

1. You don't need comments.

2. You can outsource comment-handling to other sites.

3. Those sites could, with more enlightened legislation, say "mandatory real names only, because you accept liability for your own comments and so they must be verifiably yours." Own your own words.

The core is John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fckwad Theory:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies

It's time to end it. No more Anonymous Cowards. No more pseudonyms. Sign your words or keep 'em to yourself.

Person to person comms, all right. Do what thou wilt.

You want it public? Then it carries your name and your face, forever.

Zorin OS 18.1 released - and the Lite edition reappears

Re: ARM CPU support

> you can install the Lite edition (no desktop) and simply add another DE/WM of your choice.

Well, yes, you can, but at a price.

I have texted LXDE vs Xfce at least twice:

2013:

https://www.theregister.com/2013/04/26/xbuntu_round_up/

2022:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/18/ubuntu_remixes/

In 2013, Xfce took about 50MB more RAM than LXDE.

A decade later, it took 100MB more.

I installed Xfce on Pi OS and RAM usage went from ~200MB to ~400MB. It more than doubled.

The chaps behind Raspian are _good_ and their optimisations are serious. Add your own desktop and all that goes out the window.

So, yeah, you can, but at a high price.

> Do they have a lot of internal tools they haven't released?

This is one of my reservations about Zorin OS.

There are two ways to turn GNOME Shell into something resembling any other mainstream PC desktop of the last ~30 years.

1. Fork GNOME, change it to fit.

2. Add a load of extensions to GNOME so the code remains unmodified but the desktop is transformed into something traditional.

Mint does #1. Zorin does #2.

Zorin OS uses a whole pile of GNOME extensions (and some Xfce plugins) to make GNOME and Xfce both look similar to Windows 10, ish. You can choose older or newer Windows looks if you want, back to something XP like up to something Win11 like.

Zorin keeps many of these extensions to itself. They are not on the GNOME extensions store. Some or all (I have not checked) are on Github.

E.g. here's the taskbar:

https://github.com/ZorinOS/zorin-taskbar

You can get the source and build your own .XPI and install it. That's not trivial. Sometimes upstream versions (e.g. Dash to Panel, which Zorin originally wrote and which it now sponsors) are on the store.

It is not just plugins and extensions.

The themes are on Github:

https://github.com/ZorinOS/zorin-desktop-themes

Zorin Appearance isn't there, as far as I can see.

Now this is arguably safer: GNOME extensions break from one release of GNOME to the next, and there are 2 every year. Installing your own is risky because an OS update _will_ break your desktop. It would be a lot of extra work for Zorin to support these extensions "in the wild". It only does major OS updates every ~2+ years so it only supports about 1 in 4+ GNOME versions. So long as it manages the extensions and their use and the only way to get them is to get the OS, the problem is minimised.

Zorin is not doing anything wrong here. It developed these tools and it distributes them and that is fine, fair, and reasonable.

But when it kills Zorin OS Lite when Zorin OS 19 comes out, which will presumably be based on Ubuntu 26.04 and so mean GNOME 50 and Wayland only, then no, nobody else can pick up Zorin's additions and use them. They'd need to fork the source, where available. That's a shame.

I would like to see the 3 or 4 main organisations offering Xfce-based Ubuntu downstreams cooperate: Mint, Zorin OS, Linux Lite, and maybe TeeJeeTech's Asmi.

Re: ARM CPU support

> Any advice for a similar distribution for someone who doesn't like Raspberry OS?

As I mentioned above: Alpine.

It's smaller, it's faster, it's cleaner.

Saying that, it does not play nice with dual-boot, or a Pi 5 with an SSD. No glibc = no `raspi` tools.

I also couldn't get a GUI up.

MX Linux works but they've not updated it to version 25 yet, sadly.

I think I'll be reinstalling MX on my Pi 5 -- it did the job and it was pretty quick.

Re: Poettering's spawn?

> "unable to configure Debian")?

Beat ya to it.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/31/the_cynics_guide_to_linux/

Thunderbird in hand worth 2 Outlooks as fresh FOSS fave and Firefox arrive

Re: Dark mode

> I could not figure out how to turn off Thunderbird's dark mode on a Mac.

Hang on.

Let me get this straight.

You have a Mac, and you have it in Dark Mode... and you have an app... and you are _complaining_ because the app follows the appearance you set?

Surely that can't be right. You are not happy because you set dark mode and the app appears in dark mode. You are displeased that it is doing what you told it to do.

> decryption, shirley.

Well, no.

Clients that don't support the encryption method. So, in other words, they show plain text (if available) and if not something short and clear saying "this message is encrypted and you need a suitable client to see it".

It seems to me largely meaningless to support either without the other. There's no point encrypting if you can't decrypt, and no point decrypting if you can't encrypt. So it is supporting the entirely of the process of encryption that matters, not just any specific stage of it.

Re: Betterbird anyone?

> I've had good luck with the Betterbird fork

I have mentioned it a few times.

E.g.

2y ago...

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/18/thunderbird_128_nebula/

1y ago...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/30/firefox_thunderbird_138/

Later last year...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/22/thunderbird_142/

But the thing is: I personally am perfectly happy with Thunderbird and Betterbird does nothing I want. I have the UI settings just fine, thanks, and T'bird looks much the same for me as it did 20Y ago.

Secondly, B'bird mainly focuses on Windows, with Linux second. I very, very rarely run Windows. I happen to currently do most of my email on Macs. There is _still_ no Thunderbird sync tool, and I have about 4 or 5 laptops in regular use. Trying to keep T'bird the same across all of them is a PITA and so I focus on my main desktop (a now somewhat elderly iMac) and occasionally on my main conference/events laptop (an M1 MacBook Air.) There are multiple x86 laptops with Linux but most of them dual-boot 2+ distros or OSes and that means something like a dozen copies of T'bird to keep manually synchronised. Life is too short.

I am very happy that Betterbird exists and is a useful tool for some folks. Me, I can get T'bird to do most of what I want with a few settings. The 1 dealbreaker on Linux is that it no longer uses the global menu bar, leaves its own menubar off by default (WTAF?), and when you enable it, puts its own menubar below the main toolbar (you have got to be fecking kidding). Ditto on Windows.

To fix this, I need a userChrome.css fix, which is richly ironic as I just _stopped_ using those on Firefox and Waterfox once they integrated vertical tab bars.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Re: Whassis?

> Can anyone explain what this means? I went over the release notes and can't identify it.

Oh dear. I did not consider it important enough to expand upon. Sorry about that.

The gist is this: Firefox restricts what web devices can do on your computer. Before 150, it only applied these controls to devices on the same local TCP/IP subnet as your computer _if_ you had access controls set to "strict". Now, the controls are applied even if you have access controls set to the lower level of "standard".

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/control-personal-device-local-network-permissions-firefox#w_what-is-considered-a-local-network-device