Ever since Tom decided to bring OpoLua—our modern runtime for OPL—to Linux with the introduction of a Qt-based desktop app, I’ve wanted to make it as easy to install and update as the macOS and iOS apps. This week I did that for Debian and Ubuntu by setting up a self-hosted apt repository for the software we publish—if you’re using a Debian-based system and you’ve not yet tried out OpoLua, you can get started with the following simple commands:

curl -fsSL https://releases.jbmorley.co.uk/apt/public.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/jbmorley.gpg
echo "deb https://releases.jbmorley.co.uk/apt $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jbmorley.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install opolua

I’ve successfully installed OpoLua on Debian Trixie, and Ubuntu Noble and Questing and, thanks to Colin, we have evidence that it even works on Kubuntu:

The new apt repositories are built on top of our existing GitHub CI: releases on GitHub now include manifest files that contain metadata about which platforms and architectures binaries and packages support, and these files are then used to determine what to include in the apt repository. Unlike many other GitHub-based solutions I’ve seen, I plan to host historical builds of OpoLua (and other projects) to ensure folks can access builds for their OS for as long as possible, even if we’ve had to drop it to enable new features. (Though thankfully that shouldn’t be necessary with OpoLua as Qt seems to have an amazing backwards compatibility story.)

In addition to the new repository, there have been significant developments in OpoLua over the past few months, with Tom landing a huge feature last week in the form of an interactive decompiler and debugger, complete with breakpoints and live updates:

Peeking at the inner workings of Cyningstan’s recent release for the Series 3, Dragonfell.

And finally, OpoLua wasn’t the only software to receive a release this week: the new apt repository also contains Debian and Ubuntu builds of Reporter, my lightweight file change report generator.

Coming off the back of my December Adventure, I was incredibly keen to continue a practice of daily writing—I found the process deeply rewarding and a wonderful opportunity to reflect on my work, share my process, and be more deliberate about how I approach my projects. Now, nearly a month since I last wrote, it’s clear that, while this works well in the context of adventuring, it doesn’t translate to my typical way of working. I’d like to reflect on why.

During my December Adventure, I deliberately selected relatively short, self-contained tasks that were fun or immediately rewarding—things I felt others in the Psion community might enjoy reading about—and, consequently, that made the process of writing a joy. The work of exploring and supporting older computers is also wonderfully broad, offers a wide variety of problems, and is charmingly pure when contrasted with the myriad cultural and political shifts happening in the industry and world at large. Simply put: it is something I am happy and excited to engage in and share.

As I’ve transitioned back to more work-like tasks, I find I’m taking on bigger projects in more contemporary languages that are, frankly, less fun—what I’m doing now is driven more by the outcome than the joy of the journey. Specifically, I’ve been focused on infrastructural work in both Folders, my Photos-like file manager for macOS, and Reconnect, my Psion connectivity suite for macOS. This work has necessitated spending many days bashing my head against Swift and SwiftUI, and it’s not fun to write about the endless process of working around Apple’s phoned-in APIs and absentee-parent approach to language design. It’s also much harder, working on modern platforms, to ignore the spectre of AI and how it’s fundamentally changing the culture of creation—a shift that only seems to have accelerated in the past couple of months, and one that quells the deep enthusiasm and optimism I usually hold for engineering.

With all this in mind, I’m going to go back to more ad-hoc writing, highlighting some of the larger pieces of work when I complete them, and documenting my little side-quests as and when they occur. I also hope to take some time to sit down and write about my evolving feelings around AI—specifically how it continues a decades-long trend of abdicating responsibility in product and infrastructure design.

(I note that Eli has designated the Ides of March a week of adventuring, something I suspect many of us desperately need. I have plans.)

The week got off to a slow start as I found myself spending much of Monday writing up the remainder of week 3. Beyond that, I spent time putting a final base coat of paint on the sign for our friend’s coffee shop, briefly revisited the world of Psion emulation, and set my intentions for the week ahead.

Psion ROMs

Nigel, the Psion community’s resident MAME expert, has been on a renewed push to get folks to dig out their Psions (not something that needs much encouragement), check their ROM versions, and dump them if they’re not already on record.

Much to my surprise, neither of the builds on my Revo Plus or Series 7 had been dumped, so I broke out PsiROMx and set about rectifying this travesty. Fortunately, the process of dumping an EPOC32 ROM is easy: simply select ‘Save ROM’ and specify the output location. (There seem to be some issues dumping Series 5mx Pro devices, but there are still many earlier devices we need to archive, and PsiROMx serves us well here.)

PsiROMx’s interface is wonderfully simple

I uploaded these two new ROMs to the Psion-ROM archive on GitHub and was rewarded not long after by the following screenshots of my Revo Plus ROM running in MAME:

Since I was already poking around in the Psion-ROM repository, I also took a few minutes to set up automated builds that package ROMs for use with MAME—I’d love to a establish a single source of ROMs for MAME-based Psion emulation and use this in PsiEmu to make it easy for folks to get started.

Next Steps

Having seen some indication that the hanging issues I’ve been seeing with my website builds might be a bug in InContext—my static site builder—I’ve decided to focus on that for the week. Beyond debugging the hang, I have a growing list of fixes and improvements to make and, if time permits, I’d love to flesh out the Linux support.