Author Archives: bjornstahl

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 →

In this article, I will show just how little effort that it takes to specify graphics and window management sufficient enough to provide features that surpass kmscon and the ‘regular’ linux console with a directFB like API for clients to boot. … Continue reading →

This is the first article out of two where I will go through what I consider to be the relevant Xorg feature set, and compare it, point by point, to how the corresponding solution or category works in Arcan. This … Continue reading →

We’ve accumulated enough features and fixes that it is time for yet another release. The beefier changelogs can be found here: (Arcan) and here: (Durden). Starting with the following video which consolidates the visible changes to (indirectly) Arcan and its reference desktop … Continue reading →

Two years has passed since the public presentation where Arcan and its ecosystem of side projects and tools started to creep out of the woodworks; although the project had been alive and worked on for well-over a decade at that … Continue reading →

Let me preface this by saying that this is a (very) long and medium-rare technical article about the security considerations and minutiae of porting (most of) the Arcan ecosystem to work under OpenBSD. The main point of this article is not … Continue reading →