The normal meeting space isn’t available this month or next, so tonight’s meeting is an informal get-together at 7 PM at Leo’s Coney Island. I assume if you are near, you know Leo’s. Go if that’s you.
Power notes, booting notes
Two links I yoinked from conversation in EFNet #dragonflybsd: there’s a “powersave” power management page on dragonflybsd.org that for some reason wasn’t linked in the main documentation page. I fixed that, and you may want to look at it and change your mwait settings, or look at the corepower(4) module. (From ivadasz’s comments; thanks!)
There’s also an older page on DragonFly and grub2 that may be interesting to anyone looking to boot. (From aly’s comments; thanks!)
Lazy Reading for 2019/01/13
Unofficial theme this week: me commenting on almost every link.
- An odd MIME Content-Disposition or two. I like seeing the analysis of parts of traffic people never usually see.
- My one-liner Linux Dropbox client. Not saying to do this specifically, but the tool integration is nice. (via)
- Pathfinding for Tower Defense. That whole Red Blob site has some interesting learning activities. (via)
- The oral history of the Hampsterdance. Nostalgia for something that was always transitory. (via)
- Flashing my Lenovo x230 with Coreboot. I understand why people do it, but I’d be so nervous about creating a laptop-shaped brick. (via)
- We are now closer to the Y2038 bug than the Y2K bug.
- National Inventors Hall of Fame honors creators of Unix, power drills and more. Power drills and UNIX have a history, though I am sure this was an accidental coincidence. (via)
- Adding Glue To a Desktop Environment. (via)
- Ethical alternatives to popular sites and apps. Linking for alternatives, not for ethics. (via)
- ActivityPub: The “Worse Is Better” Approach to Federated Social Networking. (via)
- The New Social Media. Also about federation. (via)
- Google and Facebook are about advertising and not about it at the same time. (via)
- How to Delete Online Accounts You No Longer Need.
- DAN64, an AVR based 8-bit microcomputer. Crazy but neat. (via)
- Your USB Serial Adapter Just Became a SDR. Software Defined Radio if you didn’t know. (via)
- HelenOS 0.8. New to me. (via)
- Building a Spotify player for my Mac SE/30. I love the FatMac shape. (via)
- ATDT relief. I admit I have done something similar to this with Asterisk and callfiles to exit meetings. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2019/01/12
Literally the first 45 minutes of me picking from saved links is all it took for this week.
- pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE-p2 now available.
- GlusterFS Cluster on FreeBSD with Ansible and GNU Parallel. (via)
- Some thoughts on FreeBSD as a desktop platform. (via)
- People who run BSD. Linked here before but recently updated. (reminded via)
- Linux network-scripts being deprecated is a problem for my home PPPoE link. Linked here cause this sort of CADT approach doesn’t happen so much on BSD…
- BSD BREATHES NEW LIFE INTO OBSOLETE EQUIPMENT. (via)
- tons of updates, more coming… (hope I didn’t break anything ?) MirBSD.
- Valuable News – 2019/01/04.
- The process of upstreaming support to LLVM sanitizers has been finalized.
- Ingo Schwarze -mandoc Better documentation – on the web and for LibreSSL video is now published.
- How NetBSD came to be shipped by Microsoft. (via)
- MWL’s 2018 Wrap-Up. More BSD books on the way!
- GhostBSD 18.12 Now Available. (via)
Your BSD smug linksfor the week: I saw these two posts in my RSS feed, one right after the other: “Get ready to patch your Linux systems with systemd, 3x new CVEs out there as of yesterday. These enable any user to escalate to root.” and “Windows 10 Bsod on three different machines after updates. On was new out of box. Any ideas? ”
BSD Now: FOSS Clothing
This week’s BSD Now talks about merchandise! No, it’s really starting with a license discussion. A merchandise-finding episode would be a good idea, though.
Cross-pollination: odd edition
I usually get all happy when I see sharing happen across BSDs, and note it here. Here’s an unexpected one: between DragonFly and Haiku.
Lazy Reading for 2019/01/06
Unofficial theme: DOOM
- Plaintext parts of email are fading away (in spam and non-spam).
- Solving murder with Prolog. (via)
- Fancy Vim Plugins. This is the first time I’ve seen a focus on the visual effect of the plugins rather than the underlying task. Something you wouldn’t expect for a terminal-style editor – and a good idea! (via)
- Reflections on DOOM’s Development. (via)
- DOOMBA. (via)
- How DOOM fire was done. (via)
- Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES. (via)
- A Most Unusual Osborne 1. (via)
- Why it’s time to reappraise the humble Choose Your Own Adventure book. (via)
- Comparing Architectures: VAX, Alpha, Itanium and X86-64. (via)
- The old guard of Mac indy apps has thrived for more than 25 years. I link that because I’ve used several of the programs named, and they are excellent, excellent examples of doing something well. (via)
- XScreenSaver 5.41.
- These products seem designed to confuse.
- Most people don’t realize how much wifi pollution there can be. (via)
- Christian Gingras: The Man Who Fixed Robotron. (via)
- How Atari created the iconic Star Wars arcade game. The cabinet design was as important an element as the game itself, I think. (via)
- Potholes to avoid when migrating to IPv6. (via)
- some images i saved to my laptop in 2018. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2019/01/05
I like when I can get Net, Free, and Open items all in the same week.
- Is any C code from 1970s Unix still used today in macOS or BSD?
- razer blade stealth. The BSD part is at the end.
- Let’s try on OpenBSD: NeuroVoider.
- Is the BSD community dedicated to free software? Sealioning, maybe.
- Using the Open Suse build service to build for FreeBSD?
- Installing OpenBSD over FreeBSD.
- SMB/CIFS on FreeBSD.
- KDE4 on FreeBSD, post-mortem.
- toying with wireguard on openbsd
- How I did start using FreeBSD. (via)
- Supporting Go Modules in pkgsrc, a Proposal. (via)
- pkgsrc-2018Q4 branch announcement.
- NetBSD entering 2019 with more complete LLVM support.
- Hyper-V and GhostBSD – lockup.
- Removing ROP Gadgets from OpenBSD. The source link also links to the slides, from EuroBSDCon 2018, and I don’t think I linked them before.
- Modern KDE on FreeBSD. (via)
- Welcome to New Subscribers and Goals for 2019. r/openbsd_gaming.
BSD Now 279: Future of ZFS
As you may have guessed, this week’s BSD Now talks about the change of ZFS code origin in FreeBSD. There’s of course other things linked, including this tattoo.
File deprecation and DragonFly upgrades
On your next DragonFly upgrade, watch the end of your ‘make upgrade’ output. You may have some deprecated files, especially if your system has been upgraded through several releases.
= You have 11 now deprecated files.
= Once you are sure that none of your third party (ports or local)
= software are still using them, rerun with REMOVE_DEPRECATED set.
The now-deprecated files will be listed just before this warning. They aren’t removed automatically in case there’s installed software still linking to them. If you are running only dports software, and are up to date with all of it, you are probably fine to remove these files:
make -DREMOVE_DEPRECATED upgrade
If you have software you compiled yourself some time ago, it may have linked to these old files. One way to search for that would be to use find to find all executable files that are in particular directories, and then use ldd to see what shared libraries are used by each executable:
find /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin -type f -perm +a+x -print -exec ldd {} \;
… and then grep for the names of the deprecated files. You’ll get a bunch of “not a dynamic executable” errors when you do this because it’s a rough example I did for this post, but you can always pipe the stdout of the command to a file and review later. If you do turn up any executables linked to the deprecated files – recompile!
(If you have a better find string or strategy, please comment.)
Why Ravenports?
Eerielinux has a new Ravenports article: Ravenports explained: Why not just join XYZ? I am linking it now because it’s DragonFly related, but it does touch on all the BSDs. It reviews the reasons for Ravenports – and its competitive advantages, if you look at it a certain way. It’s a followup to the Ravenports update and review linked here previously.
Remember
NYCBUG: OpenBSD with Brian Callahan
NYCBUG’s January meeting kicks off the new year, with an OpenBSD presentation by Brian Callahan on January 2nd. That’s this Wednesday, right after New Year’s Day. At the time I’m writing this, I don’t have the meeting agenda, but don’t let that stop you from attending, if you are near. Update: Brian told me directly what he is presenting.
Lazy Reading for 2018/12/30
Last of the year!
- The Internet of Unprofitable Things. Making mistakes permanent in hardware. (via)
- Why Mastodon is defying the “critical mass”.
- How People Used to Download Games From the Radio. (via)
- Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora. Don’t support dead ends.
- On the attempts to resurrect Space Cadet Pinball.
- xclave: Hardware Testing in Mass Production, Made Easier.
- A Short History of Computer-Generated Visual Effects.
- Some new-to-me features in POSIX (or Single Unix Specification) Bourne shells.
- Cygwin and the Windows Subsystem for Linux, when to use one and not the other. (via)
- xterm full reverse.
- RSync the old is still new…
- A Visual Defragmenter for the Commodore 64. Fun to watch, oddly. (via)
- Git Your SQL Together (with a Query Library). The “SQL Truths” section is correct. (via)
- How I wound up finding a bug in GNU Tar. Goes with the “no standard for tar” link last week. This bug could be in other tar versions… or none at all.
- EmuTOS, a free operating system for Atari computers. (via)
- Creating a (Non-Trivial) Lisp Game in 2018. Not the first language for game development. (via)
- Deorbital’s best games of 2018 named by Dante Douglas, Wasim Salman, David Shimomura, Amr Al-Aaser, Yussef Cole, and Shonté Daniels.
- The Very Slow Movie Player. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2018/12/29
A big reading week. Enjoy!
- BSD for old phones?
- Berkeley smorgasbord. (via)
- KLEAK: Practical Kernel Memory Disclosure Detection. (PDF, via)
- GhostBSD 18.01 Disk encryption?
- Request advice for controller/gamepads (Fnaify games: Axiom Verge, Chasm, Rogue Legacy).
- unix50.org. Celebrating UNIX historical systems by running them. (via)
- FreeBSD vs Linux: 20 Things To Know About Both The System. The article assumes, not surprisingly given the site, that Linux is the standard and that FreeBSD is a variant, when it’s really the other way around. (via)
- NetBSD/amd64-current Amazon Web Service EC2 c5. If you can’t read Japanese, the terminal command may help. I can’t tell. (via)
- January to September 2018 FreeBSD Status Report.
- The Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts. (PDF, via)
- Valuable News – 2018/12/28.
- The many ways to launch FreeBSD in EC2.
- A Survey of $RANDOM. (via)
- DragonFly 5.4 launch on Hacker News. Linked for the discussion, though the quality of the HN conversation is still declining. (i.e. lobste.rs is best.)
- I got a 750 MHz 64-bit HP/PA-RISC c3700 Visualize Workstation for X-mas! Put here because I think it was a BSD-heritage Unix.
BSD Now 278: The Real McCoy
BSD Now 278 has an interview of Marshall Kirk McKusick, from BSDCan 2018. If you aren’t familiar with him, he’s been involved with BSD possibly longer than you’ve been alive, and you’re probably using code he wrote, one way or another.
Old ISO move
This should, I hope, affect no-one except people running DragonFly mirrors: I moved all the DragonFly 3.x release ISOs into a different directory than the normal master download location. This should shrink mirror size.
35th CCC today, streaming
The 35th Chaos Communication Congress starts today. (I linked to the multi-day schedule.) It’s one of the few places you can see hacking, from the ground up. So, even if you aren’t near it, you can still see it, live.
Ravenports update and review
Ravenports has been updated to have DragonFly 5.4 packages, if you are using it. (note typo if copying from that email) The eerielinux site also has what I am calling a review but is more of a followup report, after extended usage of Ravenports on multiple platforms. See the initial review, too.
A holiday sandwich note
If you enjoy the Digest and want to get me to my goal of a free sandwich, I have a Patreon account. Merry Christmas/happy holidays! Normal article posting resumes tomorrow, of course.