Lunduke's Weird Computing News - Nov 6, 2022

Here is the “Weird” computer news — the retro and alternative OS stuff — for November 6th, 2022!

Currently 3 blocker bugs for Haiku Beta 4

For those looking forward to the upcoming “imminent" release of Haiku Beta 4… it’s worth noting that, according to the official Haiku bug tracker, there are only 4 issues that are marked as “blocker” for Beta 4.

Meaning that — at least as of this very moment — only three known bugs are considered critical to be fixed before Beta 4 is released.

What’s more, all three look to be fairly “simple” tasks. This bodes very well for Beta 4 being released in the near future.

If Haiku Beta 4 releases this month, it will arrive roughly 16 months after the previous version (Beta 3 was released in July of 2021).

Haiku Week Starts Wednesday!

On a related note: Starting Wednesday, November 9th, The Lunduke Journal Community will begin celebrating “Haiku Week”.

This will include articles here on The Lunduke Journal and posts over on Lunduke.Locals.com. As with past themed weeks, the community posts will be gathered up and posted for all to enjoy.

Ladybird web browser now can run Linux in a PC emulator in Javascript

In “That’s Awesome!” news: The Ladybird web browser — the completely from-scratch web browser that originated as part of the Serenity OS project — is now advanced enough that it can run JSLinux.org… a Javscript PC emulator that runs Linux.

Think about how awesome that is for a web browser that was developed… from scratch.

So… you can run Linux… in a from-scratch web browser… running on a from-scratch operating system. The future is now.

GNU Make drops support for OS/2, Amiga, Cray, and Xenix

The GNU project has announced that it will no longer be supporting multiple “retro” platforms: OS/2, Amiga, Xenix, and Cray.

While it’s always sad to see dropped support for aging and alternative operating systems… I’m not sure that the loss of future versions of GNU Make will have much of an impact on programmers for those four systems. It simply doesn’t appear to be that widely used on those platforms.

That said… you can get versions of Make in ArcaOS (the updated OS/2) and several GNU tools (such as GCC) as part of the latest AmigaOS SDK.

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