Linux Hacks

556 Articles

Linux Fu: The Cheap Macropad Conundrum

July 30, 2025 by 8 Comments

You can get cheap no-brand macropads for almost nothing now. Some of them have just a couple of keys. Others have lots of keys, knobs, and LEDs. You can spring for a name brand, and it’ll be a good bet that it runs QMK. But the cheap ones? Get ready to download Windows-only software from suspicious Google Drive accounts. Will they work with Linux? Maybe.

Of course, if you don’t mind the keypad doing whatever it normally does, that’s fine. These are little more than HID devices with USB or Bluetooth. But what do those keys send by default? You will really want a way to remap them, especially since they may just send normal characters. So now you want to reverse engineer it. That’s a lot of work. Luckily, someone already has, at least for many of the common pads based around the CH57x chips.

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Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User

July 28, 2025 by 137 Comments

After more than forty years, everyone knows that it’s time to retire the X Window System – X11 for short – on account of it being old and decrepit. Or at least that’s what the common narrative is, because if you dig into the chatter surrounding the ongoing transition there are some real issues that people have with the 16-year old spring chicken – called Wayland – that’s supposed to replace it.

Recently [Brodie Robertson] did some polling and soliciting commentary from the community, breaking down the results from over 1,150 comments to the YouTube community post alone.

The issues range from the expected, such as applications that haven’t been ported yet from X11 to Wayland, to compatibility issues – such as failing drag and drop – when running X11 and Wayland applications side by side. Things get worse when support for older hardware, like GeForce GT610 and GT710 GPUs, and increased resource usage by Wayland are considered.

From there it continues with the lack of global hotkeys in Wayland, graphics tablet support issues, OBS not supporting embedded browser windows, Japanese and other foreign as well as onscreen keyboard support issues that are somehow worse than on X11, no support for overscanning monitors or multiple mouse cursors, no multi-monitor fullscreen option, regressions with accessibility, inability of applications to set their (previously saved) window position, no real automation alternative for xdotool, lacking BSD support and worse input latency with gaming.

Some users also simply say that they do not care about Wayland either way as it offers no new features they want. Finally [Brodie] raises the issue of the Wayland developers not simply following standards set by the Windows and MacOS desktops, something which among other issues has been a point of hotly debated contention for years.

Even if Wayland does end up succeeding X11, the one point that many people seem to agree on is that just because X11 is pretty terrible right now, this doesn’t automatically make Wayland the better option. Maybe in hindsight Mir was the better choice we had before it pivoted to Wayland.

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Embedded USB Debug For Snapdragon

July 10, 2025 by 5 Comments

According to [Casey Connolly], Qualcomm’s release of how to interact with their embedded USB debugging (EUD) is a big deal. If you haven’t heard of it, nearly all Qualcomm SoCs made since 2018 have a built-in debugger that connects to the onboard USB port. The details vary by chip, but you write to some registers and start up the USB phy. This gives you an oddball USB interface that looks like a seven-port hub with a single device “EUD control interface.”

So what do you do with that? You send a few USB commands, and you’ll get a second device. This one connects to an SWD interface. Of course, we have plenty of tools to debug using SWD.

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Personal Reflections On Immutable Linux

July 10, 2025 by 51 Comments

Immutable distributions are slowly spreading across the Linux world– but should you care? Are they hacker friendly? What does “immutable” mean, anyway?

Immutable means “not subject or susceptible to change” according to Merriam-Webster, which is not 100% accurate in this context, but it’s close enough and the name is there so we’re stuck with it. Immutable distributions are subject to change, it’s just that how you change them is quite a bit different than bog-standard Linux. Will this matter to you? Read on to find out! (Or, if you know the answers already, read on to find out how angry you should be in the comments section.) Continue reading “Personal Reflections On Immutable Linux” →

Why The Latest Linux Kernel Won’t Run On Your 486 And 586 Anymore

July 2, 2025 by 108 Comments

Some time ago, Linus Torvalds made a throwaway comment that sent ripples through the Linux world. Was it perhaps time to abandon support for the now-ancient Intel 486? Developers had already abandoned the 386 in 2012, and Torvalds openly mused if the time was right to make further cuts for the benefit of modernity.

It would take three long years, but that eventuality finally came to pass. As of version 6.15, the Linux kernel will no longer support chips running the 80486 architecture, along with a gaggle of early “586” chips as well. It’s all down to some housekeeping and precise technical changes that will make the new code inoperable with the machines of the past.

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Switching From Desktop Linux To FreeBSD

June 29, 2025 by 44 Comments

People have been talking about switching from Windows to Linux since the 1990s, but in the world of open-source operating systems, there is much more variety than just the hundreds of flavors of Linux-based operating systems today. Take FreeBSD, for example. In a recent [GNULectures] video, we get to see a user’s attempt to switch from desktop Linux to desktop FreeBSD.

The interesting thing here is that both are similar and yet very different, mainly owing to their very different histories, with FreeBSD being a direct derivative of the original UNIX and its BSD derivative. One of the most significant differences is probably that Linux is just a kernel, with (usually) the GNU/Hurd userland glued on top of it to create GNU/Linux. GNU and BSD userland are similar, and yet different, with varying levels of POSIX support. This effectively means that FreeBSD is a singular OS with rather nice documentation (the FreeBSD handbook).

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Ancient SoundBlaster Cards Just Got A Driver Update

June 28, 2025 by 11 Comments

Old hardware tends to get less support as the years go by, from both manufacturers and the open-source community alike. And yet, every now and then, we hear about fresh attention for an ancient device. Consider the ancient SoundBlaster sound card that first hit the market 31 years ago. [Mark] noticed that a recent update squashed a new bug on an old piece of gear.

Jump over to the Linux kernel archive, and you’ll find a pull request for v6.16-rc3 from [Takashi Iwai]. The update featured fixes for a number of sound devices, but one stands out amongst the rest. It’s the SoundBlaster AWE32 ISA sound card, with [Iwai] noting “we still got a bug report after 25 years.” The bug in question appears to have been reported in 2023 by a user running Fedora 39 on a 120 MHz Pentium-based machine.

The fixes themselves are not particularly interesting. They merely concern minutiae about the DMA modes used with the old hardware. The new updates ensure that DMA modes cannot be changed while the AWE32 is playing a PCM audio stream, and that DMA setups are disabled when changing modes. This helps avoid system lockups and/or ugly noises emanating from the output of the soundcard.

It’s incredibly unlikely this update will affect you, unless you’re one of a handful of users still using an ISA soundcard in 2025. Still, if you are — and good on you — you’ll be pleased someone still cares about your user experience. Meanwhile, if you’re aware of any other obscure old-school driver updates going on out there, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tips line. Want to relive your ISA card’s glory days? Plug it into USB.

Image credit: Gona.eu, CC BY-SA 3.0

[Thanks to Meek Mark for the tip!]