GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 23, 2025

• Server

  • Sahilister ☛ Sahil Dhiman: Case of (broken) maharashtra.gov.in Authoritative Name Servers

    Maharashtra is a state here in India, which has Mumbai, the financial capital of India, as its capital. maharashtra.gov.in is the official website of the State Government of Maharashtra. We’re going to talk about authoritative name servers serving it (and bunch of child zones under maharashtra.gov.in).

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Bryan Lunduke ☛ The First Release of XLibre (The Xorg Fork) is Available

    And we've got the first screenshot of a GNU/Linux distro (OpenMandriva) running the Xorg fork!

• Kernel Space

  • Vermaden ☛ FreeBSD Kernel Modules pkg(8) Repositories

    To understand why they were brought to light of day its first needed to understand the problem they are here to solve.

  • Ivan ☛ Writing a basic Linux device driver when you know nothing about Linux drivers or USB

    Over the past few posts I’ve set up a Windows VM with USB passthrough, and attempted to reverse-engineer the official drivers, As I was doing that, I also thought I’d message the vendor and ask them if they could share any specifications or docs regarding their protocol. To my surprise, Nanoleaf tech support responded to me within 4 hours, with a full description of the protocol that’s used both by the Desk Dock as well as their RGB strips. The docs mostly confirmed what I had already discovered independently, but there were a couple of other minor features as well (like power and brightness management) that I did not know about, which was helpful.

    Today, we’re going to take a crack at writing a driver based on the (reverse-engineered) protocol, while also keeping the official documentation at hand. One small problem, though: I’ve never written a Linux device driver before, nor interacted with any USB device as anything else but a user.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games Playable on the Steam Deck, with Tower Wizard - 2025-06-22 Edition

    Between 2025-06-14 and 2025-06-21 we selected 14 newly released games that are rated as Verified or Playable on the Steam Deck, and meeting specific criteria in terms of user ratings. This week we’d like to showcase Tower Wizard, a cute indie game that can be finished in a dozen hours, in the Magic Archery style. Here’s below the whole list of what you can consider feeding your Deck!

• Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

  • University of Toronto ☛ The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals

    For a while, X terminals were a reasonably popular way to give people comparatively inexpensive X desktops. These X terminals relied on X's network transparency so that only the X server had to run on the X terminal itself, with all of your terminal windows and other programs running on a server somewhere and just displaying on the X terminal. For a long time, using a big server and a lab full of X terminals was significantly cheaper than setting up a lab full of actual workstations (until inexpensive and capable PCs showed up). Given that X started with network transparency and X terminals are so obvious, you might be surprised to find out that X didn't start with them.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Corey Stephan ☛ Void Linux with dwl: Minimalist Wayland (on a ThinkPad) for Daily Academic Work

    This tutorial (for lack of a better name) is an expanded and polished form of my personal notes on how to install Void Linux and configure my build of dwl (“dwm for Wayland”) on a Lenovo ThinkPad. I hope that this blog post will help at least one other person configure Void Linux for mobile research and writing.

  • BSD

    • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ Lazy Reading for 2025/06/22

      I’m on the road as I type this – though I’ll be back by the time it’s posted – and so the links are without much comment. The Best Interfaces We Never Built. The 80s were shit.   (via) Memory Banks. Malleable Software.  (via) Lightweight C compilers. Exterminate all rational Hey Hi (AI) scrapers, redux.