linux

622 Articles

Give Your Animal Crossing Villagers The Gift Of Linux

February 18, 2025 by 11 Comments

If you’ve played any of the versions of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing over the years, you’ll know that eventually you get to the point where you’ve maxed out your virtual house and filled it with all the furniture you could possibly want — which is arguably as close to “winning” the game as you can get.

But now thanks to the work of [decrazyo] there’s a piece of furniture that you can add to your Animal Crossing house that will never get old: an x86 emulator that boots Linux. As explained in the video below, this trick leverages the fact that Nintendo had already built a highly accurate Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator into Animal Crossing on the GameCube, which could be used to run a handful of classic games from within the player’s virtual living room. But it turns out that you can get that emulator to load a user-provided ROM from the GameCube’s memory card, which opens the doors to all sorts of mischief.

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Screenshot of Linux in a PDF in a browser

Nice PDF, But Can It Run Linux? Yikes!

February 10, 2025 by 21 Comments

The days that PDFs were the granny-proof Swiss Army knives of document sharing are definitely over, according to [vk6]. He has managed to pull off the ultimate mind-bender: running Linux inside a PDF file. Yep, you read that right. A full Linux distro chugging along in a virtual machine all encapsulated within a document. Just when you thought running DOOM was the epitome of it. You can even try it out in your own browser, right here. Mind-boggling, or downright Pandora’s box?

Let’s unpack how this black magic works. The humble PDF file format supports JavaScript – with a limited standard library, mind you. By leveraging this, [vk6] managed to compile a RISC-V emulator (TinyEMU) into JavaScript using an old version of Emscripten targeting asm.js instead of WebAssembly. The emulator, embedded within the PDF, interfaces with virtual input through a keyboard and text box.

The graphical output is ingeniously rendered as ASCII characters – each line displayed in a separate text field. It’s a wild solution but works astonishingly well for something so unconventional.

Security-wise, this definitely raises eyebrows. PDFs have long been vectors for malware, but this pushes things further: PDFs with computational power. We know not to trust Word documents, whether they just capable of running Doom, or trash your entire system in a blink. This PDF anomaly unfolds a complete, powerful operating system in front of your very eyes. Should we think lightly, and hope it’ll lead to smarter, more interactive PDFs – or will it bring us innocent looking files weaponized for chaos?

Curious minds, go take a look for yourself. The project’s code is available on GitHub.

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UScope: A New Linux Debugger And Not A GDB Shell, Apparently

February 7, 2025 by 7 Comments

[Jim Colabro] is a little underwhelmed with the experience of low-level debugging of Linux applications using traditional debuggers such as GDB and LLDB. These programs have been around for a long time, developing alongside Linux and other UNIX-like OSs, and are still solidly in the CLI domain.  Fed up with the lack of data structure support and these tools’ staleness and user experience, [Jim] has created UScope, a new debugger written from scratch with no code from the existing projects.

GBD, in particular, has quite a steep learning curve once you dig into its more advanced features. Many people side-step this learning curve by running GDB within Visual Studio or some other modern IDE, but it is still the same old debugger core at the end of the day. [Jim] gripes that existing debuggers don’t support modern data structures commonly used and have poor customizability. It would be nice, for example, to write a little code, and have the debugger render a data structure graphically to aid visualisation of a problem being investigated. We know that GDB at least can be customised with Python to create application-specific pretty printers, but perhaps [Jim] has bigger plans?

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16-bit Linux-like Goodness

January 5, 2025 by 15 Comments

We see many 16-bit retrocomputers around here based on Intel and Intel-like chips such as the 8086, 8088, V20, and similar. While they don’t seem very powerful by today’s standards, they were perfectly capable machines and, thanks to Elks (Embeddedable Linux Kernel Subset), you can run something fairly Linux-like on these devices.

The requirements are light: 512K of RAM is desirable, but you can do something with 256K. If you have ROM, you can even get by with 128K. Most importantly, the system doesn’t require a memory management unit to remap memory like many operating systems.

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Why 2025 Will Not Be The Year Of Linux On The Desktop

December 31, 2024 by 122 Comments

One of the longest running jokes in our sphere is that the coming year will finally be the year of “Linux on the Desktop.” Never mind that the erosion of the traditional Windows-style desktop form of computing is a thing, or that Linux-derived operating systems such as Android or Chrome OS are running on literally billions of devices across the globe, it sends up the unreasonable optimism of Linux enthusiasts back in the day that their nascent platform could depose Windows from its pedestal.

If there’s one thing we like more than a good tech joke then, it’s a well-written tech rant, and [Artem S. Tashkinov] has penned a doozy in “Why Linux is not ready for the desktop, the final edition“. It’s Linux trolling at its finest, and will surely get many a crusty open source devotee rushing to their keyboard to decry its ideas.

Aside from the inherent humor then, reading it we have to admit that he makes a set of very cogent points. Even having used a Linux desktop exclusively for a very long time indeed there’s no shame in admitting that it’s not perfect, and things such as the mildly annoying state of network file sharing or the complexity for most users of getting to grips with the security model are very fair criticisms. And the last section on the Linux community hits hard, it’s necessary to admit that the world of open source doesn’t always welcome people trying to use its software as well as it could.

But as power users of a Linux desktop for everything, more than just for writing Hackaday, we’d take the view that for all its undoubted faults, it still offers a better experience than the latest version of Windows. Oddly it could now be an acceptable desktop for many people, but the sad thing is that the need for that may well have passed to those Android and Chrome OS devices we mentioned earlier.

We’ve been known to have our own Linux related rants from time to time.

OpenWRT, But On An Unsupported Router

December 26, 2024 by 15 Comments

Everyone likes something cheap, and when that cheap thing is a router that’s supported by OpenWRT, it sounds like a win. [Hennung Paul] ordered a Wavlink WL-WN586X3 for the princely sum of 39 Euros, but was disappointed to find his device a rev. 2 board rather than the rev.1 board supported by the Linux distribution. Toss it on the failed projects pile and move on? Not at all, he hacked together a working OpenWRT for the device.

It’s fair to say that a majority of Hackaday readers will  have familiarity with Linux, but that’s something which runs on a sliding scale from “Uses Ubuntu a bit” all the way to “Is at one with the kernel”. We’d rate ourselves somewhere around halfway along that scale in terms of having an in-depth knowledge of userland and a working knowledge of some of the internals which make the operating system tick even if we’re apprehensive about tinkering at that level. [Henning] has no such  limitations, and proceeds to take the manufacturer’s distribution, itself a heavily modified OpenWRT, and make it his own. Booting over tFTP we’re used to, and we’re particularly impressed to see him using a Raspberry Pi as a surrogate host for the desoldered Flash chip over SPI.

It’s a long path he takes to get the thing working and we’re not sure we could follow it all, but we hope that the result will be a new device added to OpenWRT’s already extensive support list. It’s sometimes a shock to find this distro is now over two decades old.

Optimizing Your Linux Shell Experience

December 22, 2024 by 33 Comments

Are you familiar with Huffman encoding? That’s where you pick shorter codes for more frequent letters. Morse code is the same way, in that the most-used letters are the shortest. [Matheus Richard] had the same idea for optimizing your workflow in the Linux shell. The idea is to measure what commands you use the most and make them shorter.

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