On DragonFly, booting from a USB stick means your boot volume is usually /dev/da8. That’s a rather arbitrary distinction. As a bonus from the recent part-by-label device change, you can now find the boot disk in /dev/part-by-label/, named by the booted kernel rather than a device number. The commit message has a slightly better explanation.
SEMIBUG meeting, tonight
SEMIBUG’s monthly meeting is tonight, with Nick Holland presenting OpenBSD History. Go, if you are near Michigan.
DragonFly Aarch64 bounty
There’s a bounty entry for Aarch64 support for DragonFly, on the bounties page. This is a difficult goal, but I think worth it. Add to it if you agree.
Lazy Reading for 2019/03/17
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
- Build your own spellbook.
- Dwarf Fortress is coming to Steam … with graphics. (via)
- Freeciv-Web. The newest web version of this game. (via)
- Big Idea Famine. (via)
- The beginning of Public-key cryptography: 1874. (via)
- Supply Chain Security Talk. Open source doesn’t make your hardware known.
- In most cases, the $100 chip will blow to save a 1¢ fuse, but occasionally, the 1¢ fuse will do its job.
- Op amp on the Moon: Reverse-engineering a hybrid op amp module.
- Vim anti-patterns. (via)
- A View From A Room.
- Why Smalltalk Failed to Dominate the World. (via)
- Fixing Unix/Linux/Posix Filenames: Control Characters. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2019/03/16
There’s a number of long-running BSD series out there nowadays, some of which I’m linking to here. That’s a nice change.
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 15 – Configuration – Fonts & Frameworks. (via)
- Nixers Newsletter 117.
- “Just picked this up today!” (a SPARC laptop)
- package of the moment: tview and tcell. For terminal interface building.
- Add a TLS layer to your Gopher server.
- Tribblix, a Illumos… derivative? I didn’t know about it until now. It’s retro.
- TextSuggest, an accessibility tool, ported to OpenBSD.
- Peculiarities about Unix’s
statfs()orstatvfs()API. - OpenSSH, PAM and user names.
- OPNsense 19.1.4 released.
- End-of-February Update. BSD book progress.
- Well, it’s been a while – falling in love with OpenBSD again.
- mandoc-1.14.5 released.
- Ghost in the Shell – Part 4.
- Valuable News – 2019/03/11.
- Slay the Spire with libGDX fork & GOG Midweek Sale.
AsiaBSDCon 2019 happening soon
A reminder: If you are near Japan, AsiaBSDCon 2019 is on March 21-24, in Tokyo. Go if you are near.
Disk labels now have labeled parts
That somewhat symmetric title is to note a new device feature on DragonFly: if you use disklabel to label a disk, its parts will automatically appear under /dev. So, if you label a disk MYVOLUME, and it has 3 parts, a, b, and d, you will automatically gain a /dev/part-by-label/MYVOLUME.a, /dev/part-by-label/MYVOLUME.b, and a /dev/part-by-label/MYVOLUME.d.
BSD New 289: Microkernel Failure
BSD Now 289 is up, titled “Microkernel Failure“. Among other things, the show notes has links to all 18 existing parts of the FreeBSD desktop series that’s been going on for some time.
Stop ifconfig module loading
Thanks to Aaron LI, you can now (actually, since December) run ifconfig without involuntarily loading associated kernel modules, with the -n option. See his commit message for an example.
Serial detection in the installer
I’m finally cleaning out some things I never got to post when new: last October, the DragonFly installer gained the ability to ask for terminal type, when used over a serial cable. Thanks to Diederik de Groot for that one.
(A rare combination… but when you need it, you won’t have an alternative.)
Dports update for DragonFly-current
The binary package repository for DragonFly-current has been updated with the latest build of all packages, thanks to tuxillo and others on EFNet #dragonflybsd doing a lot of work.
Tuxillo noted: there’s new rust, thunderbird, firefox, nginx, several llvm versions, and a new chrome (version 72). freerdp is temporarily broken; use remmina with the rdp plugin instead. openvpn isn’t upgraded yet cause the build was with libressl, which is a broken combination – it’ll all be built with openssl in a future run.
Lazy Reading for 2019/03/10
Another good mix of deep dives / unique links this week. Enjoy!
- Gameboy Emulator for Emacs. (via)
- Systems Software Research is Irrelevant. 2 decades old but relevant. (via)
- What you need may be “pipeline +Unix commands” only. (via)
- Running a Modern Gopher Server. (via)
- Command Line Space Mines Simulator Game ported from BASIC to LDPL. Linked because of the source images. (via)
- chunkwm — a tiling window manager for macOS. (via)
- From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners. (via)
- Teletype Model 33.
- Writing a Book with Unix. (via)
- Seven Unix Commands Every Data Scientist Should Know. (via)
- Random numbers in the 1950s, from ERNIE, to quantum now. (via)
- Stoic Electronics. I love this look, though it has no formal name. (via)
- Related: America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the ’80s. That stuff was expensive and durable. (via)
- Also related: I took this picture myself, while cleaning up a shelf of books in a library at work.
- Browsing a remote git repository.
- Explaining Code using ASCII Art.
Final link of the week: The story that was made for me: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL.
In Other BSDs for 2019/03/09
If these aren’t enough links, some of them are links to more links.
- Using MRTG on OpenBSD.Amsterdam. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 14 – Configuration – Tint2.
- LLDB from trunk is running on NetBSD once again!
- Metasploit on OpenBSD. (via)
- Looking at NetBSD from an OpenBSD user perspective. (via)
- 2019 AsiaBSDCon registration is open (plus some NetBSD event info).
- GhostBSD: A Solid Linux-Like Open Source Alternative. A Linux site reviewing.
- Site membership and mailing list subscriptions, managed through shell scripts on OpenBSD.
- Sega Dreamcast running NetBSD, is it useful? (via)
- Nixers Newsletter 116. I keep meaning to link to these, regularly.
- Increasing coverage of signal semantics in regression tests.
- Valuable News – 2019/03/04.
- OPNSense 19.1.3 released.
- a2k19 Hackathon Report: Antoine Jacoutot on ports, syspatch(8), and more.
- Using a Yubikey as smartcard for SSH public key authentication.
- The Joy in Csh & Vi. Indirectly BSD.
vm_page_list_find2() fixes
A little thing: Matthew Dillon has made changes to vm_page_list_find2() which should improve performance in low-memory situations, though how much I don’t know. Mentioning it, cause every little bit helps – for knowledge and speed.
BSD Now 288: Turing Complete Sed
This week’s BSD Now covers a range of topics that could match what I have in my weekend posts.
Slides from NYCBUG / qmail
If you missed the qmail presentation from last night’s NYCBUG meeting, the slides are available now, and video will be coming soon. (I’ll link to it if I know about it.)
New dports build for 5.4 in place
As mentioned last week, there’s a new build of dports for 5.4, now available. No surprise, but a reminder to keep third-party software up to date is never wasted.
NYCBUG tomorrow: Maintaining qmail in 2019
NYCBUG’s having a meeting tomorrow night, with Amitai Schleier presenting on qmail. Go, if you are near, or at least read Amitai’s speaker bio.
Temporary smartctl breadkage in DragonFly master
Because someone decided years and years ago that the CAM structures should be passed through to userland, smartctl, camcontrol, cdrecord, and some other tools will be broken in DragonFly-master for a few days. If you are on -stable (5.4) this won’t affect you.
Lazy Reading for 2019/03/03
I’m going to break out the roguelike tag again even if it isn’t a perfect fit.
- Vintage CGI.
- The Gemini palmtop. (via)
- From Vimperator to Tridactyl. (via)
- A Kernel of Failure.
- Drinking coffee with AWK. Accounting through text stream editing. (via)
- Civilisational HTTP Error Codes. (via I lost it, sorry)
- Leon: An open-source personal assistant. Comments at the source link led me to Mycroft again.
- Ringen (1979). Second-oldest non-English text adventure known, preserved because it was brought into a MUD.
- Using Vim to take time-stamped notes. (via)
- How Fair Is My D20? (via)
- Google-free Android Setup. (via)
- Scientology and the Fellowship. I did not know about this Ultima link at all.
- Pi-Hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements. (via)
- Dwarf Fortress diary: The Basement of Curiosity episode seven – The Battle of Carambola Ridge.
- How I’m still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal. (via)
- Rich’s sh (POSIX shell) tricks. (via)