Compare PDFs Visually

Sometimes a problem seems hard, but the right insight can make it easy. If you were asked to write a program to compare two PDF files and show the differences, how hard do you think that would be? …

Converting An 80s Typewriter Into A Linux Terminal

Typewriters may be long past their heyday, but just because PCs, word processor software, and cheap printers have made them largely obsolete doesn’t mean the world is better off without them.…

Hacker Liberates Hyundai Head Unit, Writes Custom Apps

[greenluigi1] bought a Hyundai Ioniq car, and then, to our astonishment, absolutely demolished the Linux-based head unit firmware. By that, we mean that he bypassed all of the firmware update authe…

Quick Hack: The Phone To Stream Deck Conversion

What do you do with those old Android or iPhone phones and tablets? You have plenty of options, but it is pretty easy to build your own stream deck with a little off-the-shelf software. What’…

A Linux Business Card You Can Build

It is a sign of the times that one of [Dmitry’s] design criteria for his new Linux on a business card is to use parts you can actually find during the current component shortage. The resultin…

It’s Linux. On An ESP32

By today’s standards, the necessities for running a Linux-based operating system are surprisingly meagre in terms of RAM and processor power. Back in the day we ran earlier Linux versions on …

Tio Is A Serial Terminal For Us

With Linux and the serial port there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that Linux has great support for serial hardware of all sorts and a host of tools for accessing the serial …

Easier Self Hosting With Umbrel

While it is undeniable that cloud-based services are handy, there are people who would rather do it themselves. For many of us, it is because we want what we want the way we want it. For others, it…

Linux Fu: The Browser Emacs Fusion

It is no secret that I have a few things permanently burned into my neurons: the 1802 instruction set, the commands for WordStar, and the commands for emacs. There was a time when emacs was almost …

Need A Linux Kernel Module? Scratch That

If you have been for (or against) Rust in the Linux kernel, get ready for a Linux kernel module written in… Scratch. That’s right. Scratch, the MIT-developed language with blocks popula…

Linux Fu: Docking Made Easy

Most computer operating systems suffer from some version of “DLL hell” — a decidedly Windows term, but the concept applies across the board. Consider doing embedded development wh…

Breaking Google Nest Hub’s Secure Boot

[frederic] tells a story about their team’s hack of a Google Nest Hub (2nd generation) — running Ubuntu on it, through bypassing Google’s boot image signature checks. As with many…

Linux Fu: Up Your GDB Game!

If you want to buy a car, there are plenty of choices. If you want to buy a jetliner, there are fewer choices. If you want to use the Large Hadron Collider, you have a choice of exactly one. The ha…

Boot Mainline Linux On Apple A7, A8 And A8X Devices

[Konrad Dybcio] tells about his journey booting Linux on A7/8/8X processors, playing around with an old iPhone 5 he’s got in a drawer. It’s been a two-year “revisit every now and …

A Linux Distribution For DOOM

If you’ve gone further into the Linux world than the standard desktop distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora, you have undoubtedly come across some more purpose-built distributions. Some example…

New Part Day: X1501 Makes For A Tiny And Open Linux SoM

Ever wanted to run Linux in an exceptionally small footprint? Then [Reimu NotMoe] from [SudoMaker] has something for you! She’s found an unbelievably small Linux-able chip in BGA, and designe…

Optimizing Linux Pipes

In CPU design, there is Ahmdal’s law. Simply put, it means that if some process is contributing to 10% of your execution, optimizing it can’t improve things by more than 10%. Common sen…

Linux Fu: Easy Widgets

Here’s a scenario. You have a microcontroller that reads a number of items — temperatures, pressures, whatever — and you want to have a display for your Linux desktop that sits on…

Annotate PDFs On Linux With PDFrankenstein

On Windows and Mac machines, it’s not too troublesome to add text or drawings (such as signatures) to PDF files, but [Mansour Behabadi] found that on Linux machines, there didn’t seem t…

Linux And C In The Browser

There was a time when trying to learn to write low-level driver or kernel code was hard. You really needed two machines: one to work with, and one to screw up over and over again until you got it r…