A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
May 4th, 2026
Welcome to the 92nd issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Linux. In this edition, Graham reports on the state of GNU Hurd with very good news; Adrian untangles the Linux distro jungle and helps you choose the best one for your needs; in our Vidéothèque section, we watch "The Code" by Hannu Puttonen; and in the Library section, we review "Just for Fun" by Linus Torvalds & David Diamond, and "The Linux Programming Interface" by Michael Kerrisk.
by Graham Lee
Those of us who have been extremely online for a very long time will remember that Linus Torvalds announced his Linux kernel to a usenet newsgroup (or "froup", as the internet lexicon had it at the time) for the Minix operating system. Minix is a Unix-like operating system that Andrew S. Tanenbaum created to teach his class on operating systems, and that he published in the book "Operating Systems: Design & Implementation".
by Adrian Kosmaczewski
The Non-Aligned Movement was born in 1961, during the most dramatic period of the Cold War, in opposition to the nuclear escalation threats between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Countries from what it is now known as the "Global South" got together to figure out ways to help each other in a period of great turmoil.
Paraphrasing Apple and their famous advertising campaign, we can safely say that Finnish movie director Hannu Puttonen (1960–2023) was very interested in the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. He made a living telling their stories: those of fringe characters, edgy culture movements, and radical artistic outsiders. And that is why, in 2001, he directed the first documentary ever made about Linux, because if you think carefully about it, its story can be seen as a savant mixture of those three attributes.
Many autobiographies of famous people involve a certain amount of ghostwriting, if the subject and alleged author is not a professional writer. An actual writer listens to their stories, interviews them, maybe gets them to draft some anecdotes or chapters, then works all of that up into a narrative that a potential audience might consider readable, all the while trying to maintain some sense of the "authentic" subject's voice. It is common for that ghostwriter to get a byline on the cover, as in "iWoz" by Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, or "Under the Radar" by Robert Young and, in smaller letters, Wendy Goldman Bohm. Sometimes, you have to hunt around to work out who the ghostwriter is, as in "Lean In" by Sheryl Sandberg (and Nell Scovell, who may have done well to read the message in that very book about getting a seat at the table).
There was a time before eBooks, when developers had to buy actual massive paper editions of the most precious titles in their craft, and in some case, they had to carry them around, either for work or (also possible) for pleasure. In this particular case I have to say that I am happy to own the digital version of this Library entry, because as you can see on the cover picture of this article, it is a massive book.
