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Oldies, Hacking, and UNIX

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  • ‘Oregon Trail’ at 50: The story of a game that inspired generations

    A long, long time ago in Minneapolis, this question loomed over a small group of eighth-graders.

    Appearing on a teletype machine—basically a primitive computer keyboard connected to a printer—at Jordan Junior High School, the strange question broke open the world of The Oregon Trail. Decades later, the title remains perhaps the most influential educational video game ever created, one that endures today as its influence is still being felt across the gaming industry.

  • The Matrix Is the Best Hacker Movie

    Most people point to Sneakers, Hackers, or WarGames. They’re all wrong. The Wachowskis actually invented the ultimate cyber superhero.

  • The Jurassic Park Scene That Aged Poorly

    "It's a UNIX system...I know this!"

    According to Wired, UNIX actually is what a computer geek like Nedry would have used for Jurassic Park in 1993. But the scene where Lex "hacks" into the security system by typing extremely fast is very inaccurate and today looks unintentionally hilarious. Unlike common Hollywood portrayals of computer hacking, real hacking is often complicated and it's not something a 13-year-old would just know how to do simply because they use computers.

    And where UNIX was once extremely modern technology, it now looks a lot simpler than the coding used in security systems today. Much of "Jurassic Park," like the velociraptors entering the kitchen, is still thrilling in 2021, but this scene simply didn't hold up well.

  • Why V7 Unix matters so much

    When I talk about things involving the history of Unix, I often wind up mentioning V7, also known as Seventh Edition of Research Unix from Bell Labs (for a recent example, in my entry on when Unix got stack size limits). If you're relatively new to the history of Unix, you might wonder why V7 keeps coming up so often. There are a number of reasons that V7 matters so much both for the history of Unix and for what is what we think of as being 'Unix' and the Unix way.

    Unix and C were originally created and developed in the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center (CSRC) by various well known people like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. The CSRC's release of V7 was a pivotal moment in the history of Unix, as it was both widely publicized and relatively widely distributed. This led to a number of effects, both practical and of perceptions.

    First, V7 is effectively the common ancestor of various strains of Unix since then (this is not quite true for PWB, but close enough). Both BSD Unix and AT&T Unix (System III and System V) branched off from V7, so things in V7 were generally inherited by both of them, while things introduced after V7 (in some Unix line) had to make their way back and forth and didn't always migrate. This tends to be why I go back to V7 (and often no further) to see when something was introduced and if it was originally common to BSD Unix and System III/System V.

    Second, V7 was where a lot of what we think of as the way Unix and C are was established. V7 is where we got the Bourne shell and a relatively modern dialect of C, including stdio; both the V6 shell and C were somewhat different, to the point that you couldn't necessarily compile V6 programs even on 1980s C compilers (never mind modern ones). In fact a lot of 'Unix' comes from V7, and it's probably the oldest Research Unix that would feel normal and familiar to us today as users of modern Unix.

More in Tux Machines

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Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

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The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.