Author Archives: bjornstahl

Now for something completely different. In the spiritual vein of One Night in Rio: Vacation photos from Plan9 and AWK for multimedia, here is a tool that is the link that ties almost all the projects within the Arcan umbrella … Continue reading →

Hot on the heels of the recent Arcan release, it is also time for a release to our reference desktop environment ‘Durden‘. To refresh memory somewhat, the closest valid comparison is probably the venerable AwesomeWM – but there is quite … Continue reading →

This is the follow-up to the ‘Arcan versus Xorg: approaching feature parity’ article which is recommended reading if you have not done so already.  After that article, there was only one (and a half) real feature left to safely claim … Continue reading →

This time around, the changes are big enough across the board that the sub-projects will get individual posts instead of being clumped together, and that will become a recurring theme as the progress cadence becomes less and less interlocked. We … Continue reading →

This article is is the main course to the appetiser that was The X Network Transparency Myth (2018). In it, we will go through how the pieces in the Arcan ecosystem tie together to advance the idea of network transparency … Continue reading →

I spend most of my time digging through software-in-execution rather than software-at-rest (e.g. source code). Sometimes the subject of study is malware hissing like a snake and lashing out at the barriers of a virtual machine; sometimes it is terrible … Continue reading →

Continuing the series on using the various Arcan APIs, we get to another use case that works a bit differently here than elsewhere. What makes it interesting enough for a post is how the low and high levels fit together … Continue reading →

This is the third part in the ongoing series exploring the different levels of APIs that are available for Arcan clients. For reference, the previous parts in the series are here: https://arcan-fe.com/2018/10/31/walkthrough-writing-a-kmscon-console-like-window-manager-using-arcan/ https://arcan-fe.com/2019/03/03/writing-a-low-level-arcan-client/ In this part, we will write a … Continue reading →

This is a follow up article to the higher level writing a kmscon/console replacement. In this article, we will instead use the low-level C API to write a simple client. To recap, there are 3 APIs for writing clients: Advanced/Low- … Continue reading →

This article presents an interpretation of the history surrounding the ability for X clients to interact with X servers that are running on other machines over a network; recent arguments as to that ability being defunct and broken; problems with … Continue reading →