GNU/Linux, Games, and Hardware Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 03, 2026

• Server

  • [Old] Rachel ☛ One machine can go pretty far if you build things properly

    This is not to say I agree with everything in all of those posts, but I do like the way they remind people that one or two decent machines can probably do the job... assuming you don't just burn money by building things badly.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Civ6 Running on the OrangePi 6 Plus (with Box64 and Proton), and more!

    But can FEX, the Box64 alternative (supported directly by Valve for their new hardware) actually change anything? First I tried to compile FEX, but it’s actually a piece of software with a huge number of dependencies, and at some point the compilation failed and I could not really identify what caused the issue or how to fix it easily. But there was a way to download a pre-compiled binary, so I did that next.

  • The Arcade Blogger ☛ Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Cabinet Production

    So let’s kick things off the right way here. I have some incredible and previously unseen footage of Battlezone cabinets being built at Atari from late summer/early fall 1980.

    There’s something endlessly fascinating about watching a classic Atari title come together — not so much the design documents or the marketing materials, but the physical act of building the thing. Battlezone is one of those games where the development story and the cabinet itself are so intertwined that it’s hard to separate the two.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackaday ☛ An Event Badge Re-Imagined As A Cyberdeck

    We’re used to handheld Linux devices of varying usefulness appearing on a regular basis, but there’s something about the one in a video from [Rootkit Labs] which sets it aside from the herd. It’s a fork of a conference badge.

    The WHY2025 badge had pretty capable hardware, with an ESP32-P4, a really nice screen, and the lovely SolderParty keyboard. Here it’s been forked, to become a carrier board for their previous project, the Flipper Blackhat. This is a Linux add-on for the Flipepr Zero, and it seems that plenty of people wanted it in a more useful context. The result is something that looks a lot like a WHY badge, but running Linux.

    It’s a great shame when badges end up lying unused after the event, and ones like the WHY 2025 badge are a serious effort to make something that endures. Here, the badge endures in spirit by being forked and re-engineered, and we like it a lot. The full video is below the break.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Jasper Tandy ☛ Obsolescence

    As much as I love my phone as a device, I don't like to rely on a single thing too much. Generally, when you have one thing that does a bunch of things, it doesn't do them as well as a dedicated device would. A camera is better than your phone's camera, a dedicated gaming device is better than your phone, an audio player will likely be better than listening through your phone (and if nothing else, it has its own dedicated storage so you're not rinsing your phone storage with music).

  • Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra could get the Linux feature the S25 missed

    Google launched its Linux Terminal feature last year, but Samsung’s flagship didn’t make the cut. The Galaxy S25 Ultra had the hardware on paper, yet it couldn’t run the feature. That might change with the next generation.

    Android Authority obtained log files from a Galaxy S26 Ultra Linux build showing something crucial that was missing before: support for the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF). Google’s Linux Terminal feature requires this framework. Without it, Samsung phones stay stuck on the sidelines while Pixel devices move ahead.