T2 Linux 24.5 Released (t2sde.org) 22
ReneR writes: A major T2 Linux milestone has been released, shipping with full support for 25 CPU architectures and several C libraries, as well as restored support for Intel IA-64 Itanium. Additionally, many vintage X.org DDX drivers were fixed and tested to work again, as well as complete support for the latest KDE 6 and GNOME 46.
T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support and support for nearly all existing CPU architectures: Alpha, Arc, ARM(64), Avr32, HPPA(64), IA64, M68k, MIPS(64), Nios2, PowerPC(64)(le), RISCV(64), s390x, SPARC(64), and SuperH x86(64). T2 is an increasingly popular choice for embedded systems and virtualization. It also still supports the Sony PS3, Sgi, Sun and HP workstations, as well as the latest ARM64 and RISCV64 architectures.
The release contains a total of 5,140 changesets, including approximately 5,314 package updates, 564 issues fixed, 317 packages or features added and 163 removed, and around 53 improvements. Usually most packages are up-to-date, including Linux 6.8, GCC 13, LLVM/Clang 18, as well as the latest version of X.org, Mesa, Firefox, Rust, KDE 6 and GNOME 46!
More information, source and binary distribution are open source and free at T2 SDE.
T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support and support for nearly all existing CPU architectures: Alpha, Arc, ARM(64), Avr32, HPPA(64), IA64, M68k, MIPS(64), Nios2, PowerPC(64)(le), RISCV(64), s390x, SPARC(64), and SuperH x86(64). T2 is an increasingly popular choice for embedded systems and virtualization. It also still supports the Sony PS3, Sgi, Sun and HP workstations, as well as the latest ARM64 and RISCV64 architectures.
The release contains a total of 5,140 changesets, including approximately 5,314 package updates, 564 issues fixed, 317 packages or features added and 163 removed, and around 53 improvements. Usually most packages are up-to-date, including Linux 6.8, GCC 13, LLVM/Clang 18, as well as the latest version of X.org, Mesa, Firefox, Rust, KDE 6 and GNOME 46!
More information, source and binary distribution are open source and free at T2 SDE.
Great that somebody maintain X drivers (Score:2)
Great that somebody maintain X drivers since I am not too keen on Wayland...
Re:Great that somebody maintain X drivers (Score:5, Interesting)
T2 SDE has been around for a bit. They're usually pretty good at floating up vintage stuff to get a desktop going.
They've got a codebase that works pretty well on SGI Octane machines. The Itanium support, that's more interesting. There's not many of those machines out there.
Great that somebody maintain X drivers
These are DDX drivers, not more modern DRM drivers. DDX is the really old driver model that's pretty much required for vintage machines. Also, these are the drivers, not the server itself. No one is working on the Xorg server itself.
I am not too keen on Wayland
I don't know why people keep on with Wayland meaning the end of X. X only ends when nobody wants it anymore. There's a clear demand for it, so it'll be around for some time. The ecosystem is absolutely large enough to have multiple display technologies. Nobody is afraid of DirectFB disappearing and e16 runs great on it. It is some odd false victimization that we can only have one display technology, when we've had plenty for some time now. Heck you can still hook a VT320 to a modern box, I don't see anyone scared about loosing that.
The Wayland boogieman is so overblown.
because (Score:2, Insightful)
People are complaining about Wayland because X has clearly gone by the wayside and we are coming up with moronic workarounds that ignore that X solved these problems 40 freaking years ago. You might recall the fiasco with VSCode Server, which instead of just running remotely on a server and using X to display on a user's computer, has some cockamamie system of installing software in a user's own account, which means VSCode now has depencies both on the local computer and the remote server and because of his
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You mean, like with Netscape 4 and the Gecko engine?
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"Also - remote desktop software is the biggest kluge ever. That should have gone away with Windows 95."
Now there's a premium insight. This one really knows what he's talking about! I mean, X isn't Remote Desktop software, right?
Re:because (Score:5, Informative)
In fact he does know what he's talking about and you completely misunderstood what he said. He's talking about the concept of a remote desktop, which is what wayland devs push in place of X over ssh. The concept of remote desktop is kind of weird: we already have a local desktop running; why would we want to remote an entire desktop from a remote machine when the goal is really to run individual applications located on the remote machine? Back in Windows 95 days, MS introduced the concept of the Windows Remote Desktop because the Windows architecture has no way of remoting individual applications (at least not easily), although there's nothing in the RDP protocol that precludes it. In short the concept of a remote desktop was a hack to get Windows to have some remoting features to compete with Unix which has remoted individual X11 applications for decades.
So yes, the concept of a complete remote desktop is in may circumstances an old, obsolete notion. The exception maybe being a thin client scenario. Yet Wayland devs point to the remote desktop concept as the only scenario they wish to support. And only relatively recently has Wayland gained the ability to do a headless remote desktop, rather than just sharing a running desktop.
One wayland apologist went so far as to tell me that the idea of a remoting individual apps is something that is inevitably going away and I need to stop give up on the idea. It's old and tired, he said.
Despite that, work is moving forward on waypipe, and Xwayland will be around for a long time to support running remote X11 apps over ssh, which I use regularly. My only concern currently is that Gtk devs are gunning to drop X11 support entirely which, until waypipe is working as well as ssh X forwarding, will make running Gtk apps over ssh impossible.
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MS introduced the concept of the Windows Remote Desktop
Allow me to be pedantic...
It was actually Citrix who "invented" the Windows Remote Desktop concept. Citrix licensed the Windows NT 3.X source code, and created a customized version they called Metaframe. They added support for running multiple interactive sessions, and had an abstraction layer for connecting keyboard/mouse/video to each session. Citrix created the ICA protocol for remote desktop. Microsoft bought back the rights for NT 4.X and created Windows Terminal Server (code name "Hydra"). Rather than
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"I don't know why people keep on with Wayland meaning the end of X."
Because zero-sum game is how tribalism works. Choice is only good for choosing to join the team.
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Thanks to Mr. Rebe:
https://www.youtube.com/@MoreR... [youtube.com]
What is "SuperH x86(64)" (Score:2)
What is "SuperH x86(64)?"
Far as I know, that's the SH line formerly used in the Sega Dreamcast and has nothing to do with x86-64.
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Submitter mistake in trying to edit the list from the T2 announcement: Alpha, Arc, ARM(64), Avr32, HPPA(64), IA64, Loongarch64, M68k, Microblaze, MIPS(64), Nios2, OpenRISC, PowerPC(64), RISCV(64), s390x, SPARC(64), SuperH, i486, i686, x86-64 and x32.
VAX? (Score:2)
I've been waiting 30 years for VAX support in Linux. Still waiting...
Re: VAX? (Score:3)
Most of us have been vaxxed at some point in the last 3-4 years. That didn't happen to this distribution, though.
I'm also waiting for the Linux port to Prime minicomputers. Used one of those in the 1980s as a preteen - with a teletype over a very slow 300 baud link, complete with acoustic coupler. That thing sure wasted a lot of paper.
There may not be any Prime still in use, though, while there are reportedly some Vaxen that are.
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Is this one of these bizarre things whose OS was written in Fortran? Its architecture was probably too weird to support any type of Un*x.
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I believe it ran PRIMOS [wikipedia.org], and yes, it was originally written in FORTRAN.
Re: VAX? (Score:2)
VAX ran UNIX [bell-labs.com] (real, from Bell Labs, UNIX) as I recall, back in the day...
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From Wikipedia: "The VAX family ultimately contained ten distinct designs and over 100 individual models in total. All of them were compatible with each other and normally ran the VAX/VMS operating system."
Toaster (Score:2)
But does Linux run on a toaster ?
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/05/08/11/1754253/the-netbsd-toaster
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Ahem.
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Depends on which GPU is doing the toasting.