BSD Now 275 went up a bit late, so I’m also a bit late posting about it – this past week’s episode includes among other things, a UNIX ownership history, and gopher details.
Excuse Digest downtime
I have stuff to post, but moving DragonFly to 5.4, php to 7.2, postgres to 9.5, WordPress to 5.0, etc. Regular Digest transmissions should resume tomorrow.
Lazy Reading for 2018/12/09
Involuntary vi theme this week. Or ssh! I have lots of links.
- Old mp3 players skins, a baroque mess. (via)
- Buying a Commodore Amiga 30 years later. (via)
- Paleotronic’s 12 Years of Retro-Christmas Year One: 1980. It continues. (via)
- What makes BeOS and Haiku unique. Linking for nostalgia. (via)
- Why, oh WHY, do those #? nutheads use vi? (via)
- vi, my favorite config-less editor. I had to switch to vi away from vim just to get it to stop paying attention to where I clicked in a terminal window and changing the insertion point. (via)
- Turn Vim into Excel: Tips for Editing Tabular Data. (via)
- Open Source is Not About You. (via)
- 2018 IFComp Winners. (via)
- UTF-7: a ghost from the time before UTF-8. Maddening. (via)
- Controlling the Spice, Part 2: Cryo’s Dune.
- Experiences with the Cray X/MP (2000). (via)
- Retirement video for the Philco 212 Mainframe Computer. (via)
- And now for some keyboards that are completely different.
- redo, buildroot, and serializing parallel logs.
- The New Illustrated TLS Connection. (via)
- The needs of Version Control Systems conflict with capturing all metadata.
- How not to reconfigure your sshd.
- Safely allow commands through ssh.
- OpenSSH 7.9’s new key revocation support is welcome but can’t be a full fix.
- Up-to-date O’Reilly covers.
- Running a Gopher Server in 2018. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2018/12/08
Once again playing catchup – but we all benefit from the abundance.
- Using the GOG.com installers for Linux, on NetBSD. (via)
- Firefox’s middle-click behavior on HTML links on Linux. Should apply to BSD too.
- BSD vs. Linux. Old, but the source link has links to more discussion if that interests you.
- A proposal for a new RPKI validator: OpenBSD rpki-client(1). (via)
- NetBSD on AWS EC2 a1.medium (ARM). (via)
- The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management. (via)
- NetBSD Advent Calendar 2018. (via)
- Why BSD/OS is the best candidate for being the only tested legally open UNIX. (via)
- NetBSD and support for two finger scroll emulation. (via)
- Wherefore FreeBSD?
- Securing home. (via)
- The History of Unix, Rob Pike. I find this comment entertaining. (via)
- Showing a Gigabit OpenBSD firewall some Monitoring Love. (via)
- Portability of tar features. Linked because BSD tar is a thing. (via)
MeatBSD, soon
If you are going to MeatBSD, the reservations have to be in by Saturday. (Which is why I am posting it now instead of on Saturday for In Other BSDs.)
script(1) updates in DragonFly
I didn’t get a chance to mention this before release: script(1) has had a refresh, now sharing more options with the FreeBSD version. The update is in DragonFly-master and in the 5.4 release.
NYCBUG holiday party, tomorrow
NYCBUG’s holiday party is tomorrow at Suspenders. Go, if you are near New York City, and talk about what you’d like to see in a presentation. Chances are good someone there is familiar with the topic.
DragonFly 5.4 released!
DragonFly 5.4.0 has been released. This release bring a new compiler (gcc 8.0), asymmetric NUMA support, and a number of new and updated drivers for virtual machine devices and network.
My users@ post has the details on upgrading, as do the release notes. Note there’s a step in there to update initrd, which has been available for the last few releases, though I’ve never mentioned it. It’s probably a good idea, since that builds a mini “rescue” system, in case disaster strikes.
Lazy Reading for 2018/12/02
It’s a classic Lazy Reading this week – some deep dives, some history, some stuff that will take a while to explore. Enjoy!
- CGSociety, computer rendering showplace. Makes me think of the old Bud Plant Catalog. (via)
- Underrated websites. You may come back to this. (via)
- The recent ACM/IEEE Super Computing conference reassembled a Cray 1, serial number 1.
- Right to Repair takes a step forward. (via)
- The Twenty-Five-Year Journey of Magic: The Gathering. (via, via)
- Tiling Window Managers, a video. (via)
- What’s hiding in your PDF? A PDF used to just be encapsulated PostScript, really. It’s been stretched much, much farther. (also via)
- Sourdough culture components worldwide, mapped. (via)
- peek-for-tmux – the most smallest useful tmux trick you’ll use. Peek into a text file at the command line, but keep the prompt accessible. (via)
- eDEX-UI, futuristic interface. (via)
- Lessons on exec from 4:40PM on a Friday.
- Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine. Sort of an alien architecture to me at this point, years later. (via)
- The story of the ZX81, in tweets. (via I lost it, sorry)
- The special effects for the computer display in “Escape From New York”. (via)
- Why Chips Die. Proportionally related to user need, of course. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2018/12/01
An oddly uplifting batch of BSD stories this week.
- Tor on OpenBSD, part 5 and part 6.
- Slides and transcript and code from the November NYCBUG meeting. (I wish all BUG meetings had this.)
- MeatBSD, the December SEMIBUG meeting, is a meetup at a local meat-heavy restaurant, December 18th. Plan for it now, cause you need to reserve a seat.
- Steam Autumn Sale Highlights for OpenBSD.
- OPNsense 18.7.8 released.
- GhostBSD 18.10 Now Available. (via)
- Abandon Linux – Move to FreeBSD or Illumos. A pro-ZFS item, which means plenty of filesystem comments at the source link. (via)
- Debugging rcctl in OpenBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD for Thanksgiving. This is a nice story to hear. (via)
- Stardew Valley on FreeBSD. (via)
- Cheap BSD-friendly notebook? Thinkpads thinkpads stinkpads thinkpads. (via)
iwn 6035 support in DragonFly
If you happen to have a Intel Centrino advanced 6035 wireless card, it now works on DragonFly, thanks to Tobias Heilig.
BSD Now 274: Language: Assembly
This week’s BSD Now covers assembly on OpenBSD, games on FreeBSD, and disk space on DragonFly.
How all those dports get built
I’ve mentioned it before, but the tool ‘synth‘ is what DragonFly uses to build all the dports binaries – over 30,000 packages, though I’m typing that from memory and not from looking at a tool. Anyway, the one part of the release process I’ve never touched was the package building – and now it’s documented. This document is oriented towards DragonFly releases – but if you wanted to create your own package repo with custom options, this is the way to do it.
DragonFly 5.4rc1 image to use
I uploaded the current 5.4 release candidate – there’s an ISO and an IMG file, though your local mirror may be a better place to get it than those links. Or just wait; I think the release won’t be long.
Note that I was smart for once and named it ‘rc1’, so if there’s another release candidate, it can be named ‘rc2’. I used ‘rc’ in previous releases and was never sure if I should name a second candidate rc1, rc2…
wpa_supplicant installed by default in DragonFly
Bear with me; this is the history: wpa_supplicant is the program DragonFly uses to connect to most wireless networks. It’s been part of the base system for some time, but if you start it up, you will see a warning (at boot time) about how this version is deprecated. Installing from dports puts a newer version in place.
As is the case with most third-party include in any operating system’s base, there’s always lag between the newest version of software and what’s been included in. Dependencies creep in, or it’s duplicated work between packaging and basic OS maintenance, etc. (Who here used Perl on FreeBSD 4? That was frustrating, but a good example here.) Anyway, the dilemma is that since wpa_supplicant is a program that may be required in order to get online, it must be in the base install. However, since it has / had vulnerabilities, it must be updated. The base install doesn’t update as fast as the origin of the software, and there’s the mismatch.
All that’s a long explanation as to why network/wpa_supplicant is now on the DragonFly install CD, and gets automatically used if installed. Thanks for Aaron LI and Matthew Dillon for making it happen. The base package is still there, in case someone deletes their installed ports and needs to get online before they can reinstall. This is in master now and will be in the 5.4 release.
Lazy Reading for 2018/11/25
A sorta backwards-looking list for you, this week.
- IBM PC-XT Emulator on an ESP8266. The hardware is basically a wifi USB plug. (via)
- Leak Mitigation Checklist. “If you just leaked sensitive information in public source code…” (also via)
- @Play 87: Interview with Josh Ge, Creator of Cogmind.
- C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines. Wierd, wierd systems. (via)
- What I really miss when I don’t have X across the network.
- For a brief period, the kernel tried to deal with gamma rays corrupting the processor cache. Not … impossible?
- So tonight I’m gonna blog like it’s 2002.
- Learn Git Branching. (via)
- Hardware effects. (via)
- Fun tip #1: Apply a diff with ed.
- Moving away from Emacs, 130 days after.
- “please don’t “disrupt” my dotfiles, tech industry” (via)
- Why Aren’t There C Conferences? (via)
- sr.ht, the hacker’s forge, now open for public alpha. BSD-friendly, too. (via)
Unrelated video of the week: Mashups are a mental dead end in most cases, but this “Benny Hill/Slayer Mashup Disaster” tickled me. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2018/11/24
Games are the unofficial accidental theme this week.
- FreeBSD 12 Release Engineering Branch Created. Also, RC1 (via)
- Distrowatch.com NetBSD 8.0 Review. (via)
- Celebrating 50 years of Unix. (via)
- FreeBSD Network Management with network.sh. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 2.1 – Install FreeBSD 12.
- Our pragmatic attachment to OpenBSD PF for our firewall needs.
- Linux iptables compared to OpenBSD PF (through a real example).
- Bump.
- (OpenBSD) /etc/malloc.conf replaced by sysctl.
- (OpenBSD) ifconfig(8): vlandev and vlan upcoming option removal along with vlan(4): Replace link0 flag with txprio.
- Let’s Try on OpenBSD – Dust: An Elysian Tail and Let’s Try on OpenBSD: Capsized.
- GOG Black Friday Sale. A nice connection between sale and port.
- Games on FreeBSD. A port of fnaify to other BSDs!
- More OpenBSD contributions.
- Valuable News – 2018/11/17.
BSD Now 273: A Thoughtful Episode
This week’s BSD Now (notice I’m spelling it correctly now, with a space) has, along with NetBSD and OpenBSD material, happens to talk about NomadBSD, which I’ve never really managed to cover.
DragonFly 5.4rc1 tagged
I tagged the first release candidate for DragonFly 5.4 last night. The commit message has summary lines from all the commits in this release, if you want to go through them – or wait for the release notes. I’m happy to see some new-to-me committer names in there, too.
Booting DragonFly EFI, and with something else
If you were looking to run DragonFly on the same disk as another operating system, Dr. Martin Ivanov has advice for you. Similarly, karu.pruun and Pierre-Alain TORET also have something on EFI booting.