It’s with sadness that we note the passing of Thomas E. Kurtz, on November 12th. He was co-inventor of the BASIC programming language back in the 1960s, and though his creation may not receive the attention in 2024 that it would have done in 1984, the legacy of his work lives on in the generation of technologists who gained their first taste of computer programming through it.

The origins of BASIC lie in the Dartmouth Timesharing System, like similar timesharing operating systems of the day, designed to allow the resources of a single computer to be shared across many terminals. In this case the computer was at Dartmouth College, and BASIC was designed to be a language with which software could be written by average students who perhaps didn’t have a computing background. In the decade that followed it proved ideal for the new microcomputers, and few were the home computers of the era which didn’t boot into some form of BASIC interpreter. Kurtz continued his work as a distinguished academic and educator until his retirement in 1993, but throughout he remained as the guiding hand of the language.

Should you ask a computer scientist their views on BASIC, you’ll undoubtedly hear about its shortcomings, and no doubt mention will be made of the GOTO statement and how it makes larger projects very difficult to write. This is all true, but at the same time it misses the point of it being a readily understandable language for first-time users of machines with very little in the way of resources. It was the perfect programming start for a 1970s or 1980s beginner, and once its limitations had been reached it provided the impetus for a move to higher things. We’ve not written a serious BASIC program in over three decades, but we’re indebted to Thomas Kurtz and his collaborator for what they gave us.

Thanks [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

Within the world of CAD there are the well-known and more niche big commercial players and there are projects like FreeCAD that seek to bring a OSS solution to the CAD world. As with other OSS projects like the GIMP, these OSS takes on commercial software do not always follow established user interactions (UX), which is where Ondsel sought to bridge the gap by giving commercial CAD users a more accessible FreeCAD experience. This effort is now however at an end, with a blog post by Ondsel core team member [Brad Collette] providing the details.

The idea of commercializing OSS is by no means novel, as this is what Red Hat and many others have done for decades now. In our article on FOSS development bounties we touched upon the different funding models for FOSS projects, with the Linux kernel enjoying strong commercial support. The trick is of course to attract such commercial support and associated funding, which is where the development on the UI/UX and feature set of the core FreeCAD code base was key. Unfortunately the business case was not strong enough to attract such commercial partners and Ondsel has been shutdown.

As also discussed on the FreeCAD forum, the Ondsel codebase will likely be at least partially merged into the FreeCAD code, ending for now the prospect of FreeCAD playing in the big leagues with the likes of AutoCAD.

Thanks to [Brian Harrington] for the tip.

Artificial intelligence has always been around us, with [Timothy J. O’Malley]’s 1985 book on AI projects for the Commodore 64 being one example of this. With AI defined as being the theory and development of systems that can perform tasks that normally requiring human intelligence (e.g. visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making), this book is a good introduction to the many ways that computer systems for decades now have been able to learn, make decisions and in general become more human-like. Even if there’s no electronic personality behind the actions.

In the book’s first chapter, [Timothy] isn’t afraid to toss in some opinions about the true nature of intelligence and thinking. Starting with the concept that intelligence is based around storing information and being able to derive meaning from connections between stored pieces of information, the idea of a basic AI as one would use in a game for the computer opponent arises. A number of ways of implementing such an AI is explored in the first and subsequent chapters, using Towers of Hanoi, chess, Nim and other games.

After this we look at natural language processing – referencing ELIZA as an example – followed by heuristics, pattern recognition and AI for robotics. Although much of this may seem outdated in this modern age of LLMs and neural networks, it’s important to realize that much of what we consider ‘bleeding edge’ today has its roots in AI research performed in the 1950s and 1960s. As [Timothy] rightfully states in the final chapter, there is no real limit to how far you can push this type of AI as long as you have more hardware and storage to throw at the problem. This is where we now got datacenters full of GPU-equipped systems churning through vector space calculations for the sake of today’s LLM & diffusion model take on ‘AI’.

Using a Commodore 64 to demonstrate the (lack of) validity of claims is not a new one, with recently a group of researchers using one of these breadbin marvels to run an Ising model with a tensor network and outperforming IBM’s quantum processor. As they say, just because it’s new and shiny doesn’t necessarily mean that it is actually better.

Many MacOS users are probably used by now to the annoyance that comes with unsigned applications, as they require a few extra steps to launch them. This feature is called Gatekeeper and checks for an Apple Developer ID certificate. Starting with MacOS Sequoia 15, the easy bypassing of this feature with e.g. holding Control when clicking the application icon is now no longer an option, with version 15.1 disabling ways to bypass this completely. Not unsurprisingly, this change has caught especially users of open source software like OpenSCAD by surprise, as evidenced by a range of forum posts and GitHub tickets.

The issue of having to sign applications you run on MacOS has been a longstanding point of contention, with HomeBrew applications affected and the looming threat for applications sourced from elsewhere, with OpenSCAD issue ticket #880 from 2014 covering the saga for one OSS project. Now it would seem that to distribute MacOS software you need to have an Apple Developer Program membership, costing $99/year.

So far it appears that this forcing is deliberate on Apple’s side, with the FOSS community still sorting through possible workarounds and the full impact.

Thanks to [Robert Piston] for the tip.

While most operating systems are written in C and C++, KolibriOS is written in pure x86 assembly and as a result small and lightweight enough to run off a standard 1.44 MB floppy disk, as demonstrated in a recent video by [Michael].

As a fork of 32-bit MenuetOS back in 2004, KolibriOS has since followed its own course, sticking to the x86 codebase and requiring only a modest system with an i586-compatible CPU, 8 MB of RAM and VESA-compatible videocard. Unlike MenuetOS’ proprietary x86_64 version, there’s no 64-bit in KolibriOS, but at this level you probably won’t miss it.

In the video by [Michael], the OS boots incredibly fast off both a 3.5″ floppy and a CD-ROM, with the CD-ROM version having the advantage of more software being provided with it, including shareware versions of DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D.

Although web browsers (e.g. Netsurf) are also provided, [Michael] did not get Ethernet working, though he doesn’t say whether he checked the hardware compatibility list. Quite a few common 3Com, Intel and Realtek NICs are supported out of the box.

For audio it was a similar story, with the hardware compatibility left unverified after audio was found to be not working. Despite this, the OS was fast, stable, runs DOOM smoothly and overall seems to be a great small OS for x86 platforms that could give an old system a new lease on life.

Probably not too many people around the world celebrated November 1st, 2023, but on this momentous date FreeBSD celebrated its 30th birthday. As the first original fork of the first complete and open source Unix operating system (386BSD) it continues the legacy that the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) began in 1978 until its final release in 1995. The related NetBSD project saw its beginnings somewhat later after this as well, also forking from 386BSD. NetBSD saw its first release a few months before FreeBSD’s initial release, but has always followed a different path towards maximum portability unlike the more generic nature of FreeBSD which – per the FAQ – seeks to specialize on a limited number of platforms, while providing the widest range of features on these platforms.

This means that FreeBSD is equally suitable for servers and workstations as for desktops and embedded applications, but each platform gets its own support tier level, with the upcoming version 15.x release only providing first tier support for x86_64 and AArch64 (ARMv8). That said, if you happen to be a billion-dollar company like Sony, you are more than welcome to provide your own FreeBSD support. Sony’s Playstation 3, Playstation 4 and Playstation 5 game consoles namely all run FreeBSD, along with a range of popular networking and NAS platforms from other big names. Clearly, it’s hard to argue with FreeBSD’s popularity.

Despite this, you rarely hear people mention that they are running FreeBSD, unlike Linux, so one might wonder whether there is anything keeping FreeBSD from stretching its digital legs on people’s daily driver desktop systems?

In The Beginning There Was UNIX

Once immortalized on the silver screen with the enthusiastically spoken words “It’s a UNIX system. I know this.”, the Unix operating system (trademarked as UNIX) originated at Bell Labs where it initially was only intended for internal use to make writing and running code for systems like the PDP-11 easier. Widespread external use started with Version 6, but even before that it was the starting point for what came to be known as the Unix-based OSes:

After FreeBSD and NetBSD forked off the 386BSD codebase, both would spawn a few more forks, most notable being OpenBSD which was forked off NetBSD by Theo de Raadt when he was (controversially) removed from the project. From FreeBSD forked the Dragonfly BSD project, while FreeBSD is mostly used directly for specific applications, such as GhostBSD providing a pleasant desktop experience with preconfigured desktop and similar amenities, and pfSense for firewall and router applications. Apple’s Darwin that underlies OS X and later contains a significant amount of FreeBSD code as well.

Overall, FreeBSD is the most commonly used of these OSS BSDs and also the one you’re most likely to think of when considering using a BSD, other than OS X/MacOS, on a desktop system.

Why FreeBSD Isn’t Linux

The Linux kernel is described as ‘Unix-like’, as much like Minix it does not directly derive from any Unix or BSD but does provide some level of compatibility. A Unix OS meanwhile is the entirety of the tools and applications (‘userland’) that accompany it, something which is provided for Linux-based distributions most commonly from the GNU (‘GNU is Not Unix’) project, ergo these Linux distributions are referred to as GNU/Linux-based to denote their use of the Linux kernel and a GNU userland. There is also a version of Debian which uses GNU userland and the FreeBSD kernel, called Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, alongside a (also Unix-like) Hurd kernel-based flavor of Debian (Debian GNU/Hurd).

In terms of overall identity it’s thus much more appropriate to refer to ‘Linux kernel’ and ‘GNU userland’ features in the context of GNU/Linux, which contrasts with the BSD userland that one finds in the BSDs, including modern-day MacOS. It is this identity of kernel- and userland that most strongly distinguishes these various operating systems and individual distributions.

These differences result in a number of distinguishing features, such as the kernel-level FreeBSD jail feature that can virtualize a single system into multiple independent ones with very little overhead. This is significantly more secure than a filesystem-level chroot jail, which was what Unix originally came with. For other types of virtualization, FreeBSD offers bhyve, which can be contrasted with the kernel-based virtualization machine (KVM) in the Linux kernel. Both of these are hypervisor/virtual machine managers that can run a variety of guest OSes. As demonstrated in a comparison by Jim Salter, between bhyve and KVM there is significant performance difference, with bhyve/NVMe on FreeBSD 13.1 outperforming KVM/VirtIO on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS by a large margin.

What this demonstrates is why FreeBSD for storage and server solutions is such a popular choice, and likely why Sony picked FreeBSD for its customized Playstation operating systems, as these gaming consoles rely heavily on virtualization, as with e.g. the PS5 hypervisor.

OpenZFS And NAS Things

A really popular application of FreeBSD is in Network-Attached Storage (NAS), with originally FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) running the roost here, with iXsystems providing both development and commercial support. Here we saw some recent backlash, as iXsystems announced that they will be adding a GNU/Linux-based solution (TrueNAS SCALE), while the FreeBSD-based version (TrueNAS CORE) will remain stuck on FreeBSD version 13. Here The Register confirmed with iXsystems that this effectively would end TrueNAS on FreeBSD. Which wouldn’t be so bad if performance on Linux wasn’t noticeably worse as covered earlier, and if OpenZFS on Linux wasn’t so problematic.

Unlike with FreeBSD where the ZFS filesystem is an integral part of the kernel, ZFS on Linux is more of an afterthought, with a range of different implementations that each have their own issues, impacting performance and stability. This means that TrueNAS on Linux will be less stable, slower and also use more RAM. Fortunately, as befits an open source ecosystem, an alternative exists in the form of XigmaNAS which was forked from FreeNAS and follows current FreeBSD fairly closely.

 

So what is the big deal with ZFS? Originally developed by Sun for the Solaris OS, it was released under the open source CDDL license and is the default filesystem for FreeBSD. Unlike most other filesystems, it is both the filesystem and volume manager, which is why it natively handles features such as RAID, snapshots and replication. This also provides it with the ‘self-healing’ ability where some degree of data corruption is detected and corrected, without the need for dedicated RAID controllers or ECC RAM.

For anyone who has had grief with any of the Ext*, Reiserfs or other filesystems (journaled or not) on Linux, this probably sounds pretty good, and its tight integration into FreeBSD again explains why it’s it’s such a popular choice for situations where data integrity, performance and stability are essential.

FreeBSD As A Desktop

It’s probably little surprise that FreeBSD-as-a-desktop is almost boringly similar to GNU/Linux-as-a-desktop, running the Xorg server and one’s desktop environment (DE) of choice. Which also means that it can be frustratingly broken, as I found out while trying to follow the instructions in the FreeBSD handbook for setting up Xfce. This worked about as well as my various attempts over the years to get to a working startx on Debian and Arch. Fortunately trying out another guide on the FreeBSD Foundation site quickly got me on the right path. This is where using GhostBSD (using the Mate DE by default) is a timesaver if you want to use a GUI with your FreeBSD but would like to skip the ‘deciphering startx error messages’ part.

After installation of FreeBSD (with Xfce) or GhostBSD, it’s pretty much your typical desktop experience. You got effectively the same software as on a GNU/Linux distro, with FreeBSD even providing binary (user-space) compatibility with Linux and with official GPU driver support from e.g. NVidia (for x86_64). If you intend to stick to the desktop experience, it’s probably quite unremarkable from here onwards, minus the use of the FreeBSD pkg (and source code ports) package manager instead of apt, pacman, etc.

Doing Some Software Porting

One of my standard ways to test out an operating system is to try and making some of my personal open source projects run on it, particularly NymphCast as it takes me pretty deep through the bowels of the OS and its package management system. Since NymphCast already runs on Linux, this should be a snap, one would think. As it turns out, this was mostly correct. From having had a play with this on FreeBSD a few years ago I was already aware of a few gotchas, such as the difference between GNU make and BSD make, with the former being available as the gmake package and command.

Another thing you may want to do is set up sudo (also a package) as this is not installed by default. After this it took me a few seconds to nail down the names of the dependencies to install via the FreeBSD Ports site, which I added to the NymphCast dependencies shell script. After this I was almost home-free, except for some details.

These details being that on GhostBSD you need to install the GhostBSD*-dev packages to do any development work, and after some consulting with the fine folks over at the #freebsd channel on Libera IRC I concluded that using Clang (the system default) to compile everything instead of GCC would resolve the quaint linker errors, as both apparently link against different c++ libraries (clang/libc++ vs gcc/libstdc++).

This did indeed resolve the last issues, and I had the latest nightly of NymphCast running on FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE, playing back some videos streaming from Windows & Android systems. Not that this was shocking, as the current stable version is already up on Ports, but that package’s maintainer had make similar tweaks (gmake and use of clang++) as I did, so this should make their work easier for next time.

FreeBSD Is Here To Stay

I’ll be the first to admit that none of the BSDs really were much of a blip on my radar for much of the time that I was spending time with various OSes. Of course, I got lured into GNU/Linux with the vapid declarations of the ‘Year of the Linux Desktop’ back in the late 90s, but FreeBSD seems to always have been ‘that thing for servers’. It might have been just my fascination with porting projects like NymphCast to other platforms that got me started with FreeBSD a few years ago, but the more you look into what it can do and its differences with other OSes, the more you begin to appreciate how it’s a whole, well-rounded package.

At one point in time I made the terrible mistake of reading the ‘Linux From Scratch’ guide, which just reinforced how harrowingly pieced together Linux distributions are. Compared to the singular code bases of the BSDs, it’s almost a miracle that Linux distributions work as well as they do. Another nice thing about FreeBSD is the project structure, with no ‘Czar for life’, but rather a democratically elected core leadership. In the 30-year anniversary reflection article (PDF) in FreeBSD Journal the way this system was created is described. One could say that this creates a merit-based system that rewards even newcomers to the project. As a possible disadvantage, however, it does not create nearly the same clickbait-worthy headlines as another Linus Torvalds rant.

With widespread industry usage of FreeBSD and a strong hobbyist/enthusiast core, it seems fair to say that FreeBSD’s future looks brighter than ever. With FreeBSD available for easy installation on a range of SBCs and running well in a virtual machine, it’s definitely worth it to give it a try.

For fans of retro games, Pac-Man is nothing short of iconic—a game so loved it’s been ported to nearly every console imaginable. But the Atari 2600 version, released in 1982, left players scratching their heads – as laid out in a video by [Almost Something]. Atari had licensed Pac-Man to ride the wave of its arcade success, but the home version, programmed solely by [Todd Fry], missed the mark, turning an arcade icon into a surprising lesson in over-ambitious marketing.

Despite the hype, [Fry] faced an almost impossible task: translating Pac-Man’s detailed graphics and complex gameplay to the Atari’s limited 4 K cartridge with only 128 bytes of RAM. Atari’s strict limitations on black backgrounds and its choice to cut costs by sticking with a 4 K cartridge left the game barely recognizable. The famous pellet-chomping maze became simpler, colors were changed, and the iconic ghosts—reduced to single colors—flickered constantly. And then, Atari went all in, producing twelve million copies, betting on the success of universal appeal. In a twist, Pac-Man did sell in record numbers (over seven million copies) but still fell short of Atari’s expectations, leaving millions of unsold cartridges eventually dumped in a New Mexico landfill.

This debacle even kind of marked Atari’s 1983 decline. Still, Pac-Man survived the hiccup, evolving and outlasting its flawed adaptation on the 2600. If you’re interested in learning more about the ins and outs of game ports, check out the fantastic talk [Bob Hickman] gave during Supercon 2023.

Are you ready to elevate your interactive possibilities without breaking the bank? If so, explore [Caio Bassetti]’s tutorial on creating a full 3D hand controller using only a webcam, MediaPipe Hands, and Three.js. This hack lets you transform a 2D screen into a fully interactive 3D scene—all with your hand movements. If you’re passionate about low-cost, accessible tech, try this yourself – not much else is needed but a webcam and a browser!

The magic of the project lies in using MediaPipe Hands to track key points on your hand, such as the middle finger and wrist, to calculate depth and positioning. Using clever Three.js tricks, the elements can be controlled on a 3D axis. This setup creates a responsive virtual controller, interpreting hand gestures for intuitive movement in the 3D space. The hack also implements a closed-fist gesture to grab and drag objects and detects collisions to add interactivity. It’s a simple, practical build and it performs reliably in most browsers.

For more on this innovation or other exciting DIY hand-tracking projects, browse our archive on gesture control projects, or check out the full article on Codrops. With tools such as MediaPipe and Three.js, turning ideas into reality gets more accessible than ever.

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