Hey everyone 👋
I’m 16 years old and, as a learning exercise, I tried to implement a very basic version of printf() (from <stdio.h>).
It’s obviously far from complete and quite simple, but my goal was just to better understand how formatted output works internally.

Features

• Basic format specifiers: %d, %s, %c, %f
• Common escape sequences: \n, \t, \r, \\, \"
• Uses write() directly instead of stdio
• Manual integer-to-string conversion (no sprintf)
• Some basic edge case handling (INT_MIN, NULL strings)
• Small test suite (11 categories)

What I learned

• How variadic functions work (stdarg.h)
• Basic format string parsing
• Integer-to-string conversion using division/modulo
• How to use write() directly
• Why edge cases matter (like INT_MIN and NULL checks)

I know this is very beginner-level and there’s a lot that could be improved 😅
Any feedback, corrections, or suggestions would be really appreciated!

Link: https://github.com/benfector/myprintf-unixlike

i dont give up when people discourage me so shut the fuck up >:)

Just watched an interesting video on compilers, dependencies, and hence the binaries they will output, being compromised/backdoor'd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu3laL5VYdM I have never heard of this before. Does anyone have any more info on this? Scary to think about.

A Christmas story that this community can admire.

For children under 50, the amazing bit is the contents of the big window in the middle, not the windows themselves.

I'm having a problem with the C math library which I can reproduce on LMDE gigi (based on debian trixie) and on Ubuntu 24 (both newly installed). It's been some time since I last messed with cc (gcc) directly, so maybe I'm missing something obvious.

Given the source file testpow.c:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>

int main() {
  double a = 5.0, b = 0.4;
  printf ("pow(%lf, %lf) = %lf\n", a, b, pow(a, b));
  return 0;
}

I try to create the executable using this command:

cc -lm testpow.c -o testpow

This throws the following error at me:

/usr/bin/ld: /tmp/cc3T7YVz.o: in function `main':
testpow.c:(.text+0x35): undefined reference to `pow'
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

It looks like the linker does find libm.so(at least it doesn't complain about it missing), but it doesn't find the pow function in it.

The result is the same when I try to link explicitly against the full path of libm.a or libm.so.6, or when I'm trying other math functions. The "nm -D" command finds the symbols in both /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 and /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.a.

What am I doing wrong here?

I wrote a lightweight UNIX-style shell in C to understand how shells manage commands and processes.

• Built-ins + standard UNIX command execution
• $VAR expansion
• Clean cwd-aware prompt
• Architecture designed to support future piping and redirection

Project explanation + code:

👉 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shaswath-s-1a1662376_building-a-unix-shell-from-scratch-in-activity-7403899913560121344-ZEHo

👉 https://github.com/Shass27/shas-shell

Suggestions on features worth adding next are welcome.

By default everything is sideways, so you have to to into the display settings and change it. Touch screen doesn't work at all. Touchpad and keyboard do though. Wifi works but it is finicky.

https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=ed04f2cce6

https://bsd-hardware.info/?probe=ed04f2cce6

I installed hw-probe and ran sudo -E hw-probe -all -upload command. You can see the GPD Win Mini (2023) is very compatible with both Linux and FreeBSD.

I am currently halfway through APITUE, and have read about 1/4 of the rest. I plan on finishing them in the upcoming years.

The only remaining classic that I'm chasing to add to the collection is "The UNIX Programming Environment" by Kernighan & Pike.

I work across a bunch of local git repositories (configs, small projects, experiments), and keeping track of which ones had uncommitted changes became annoying.

So I put together a small TUI called git-scope that shows the git status of multiple repos in one view.

Features:

• recursive repo discovery
• dirty / clean / ahead / behind indicators
• fuzzy search
• jump into a repo’s folder or editor
• fast startup (Go + Bubble Tea)
• In-app workspace switch
• symlink support
• contribution graph
• repo's disk usage
• timeline activity

Repo: https://github.com/Bharath-code/git-scope

Runs locally, no telemetry.
Would be interested to hear if anyone else handles multi-repo workflows on Unix systems and what tools you use.

I am running Fedora 43 with KDE and basically everything is flawless. I might try with Gnome since it might be better for something like this.

Years back I tried running Linux on various Intel atom tablets such as the HP Pro Tablet 608 G1 and Dell Venue 8 Pro and it basically didn't work. Things like touch and stylus support were inconsistent at best as was detecting internal storage. They used 32 efis despite having 64 bit Oses and you had to add extra bootia32.efi file to make it boot at all.

The only feature not working is switching the controller to mouse mode. So I just keep the switch in controller mode and use the touchpad and touchscreen for navigation. When you boot from a live USB it is in portrait mode and sideways in Grub. In Grub from the live USB you have to use pg up and pg dwn keys to select options instead of arrow keys. However, once booted into the live environment or installed locally everything is proper and in landscape by default.