I always thought IRC was pretty decentralized, but I didn’t realize talk(1) was designed to work machine-to-machine. That means in theory that if you have a talk(1) binary on your machine, you could chat directly to anyone else with the same binary, even on a different platform. Since 4.3BSD! Anyway, I only realized this because of this recent bugfix thanks to Dan Cross.
BSD Now 385: Wireguard VPN mesh
A very straightforward title in this week’s BSD Now; worth listening to for more information on Wireguard, the new hotness.
TeX Live 2021 DragonFlyBSD
The short answer is: works great. The version in dports lags, cause it’s based on what’s in the FreeBSD package collection, and that’s not updated as quickly.
This is technically the prerelease, since the official one is a few months off. TeX Live binaries can be downloaded directly for DragonFly.
Also, dpkg update
This happened a little bit ago but I wanted to be able to post a solution to the pkg upgrade issue (yesterday) before mentioning it: there’s a freshly built batch of packages for DragonFly, so now is a good time to upgrade with pkg.
A fix for sudden Lua errors in pkg
If you upgrade pkg on your system, it may start erroring out. This is because the default config will confuse the newer version. To fix this, you can copy over a working config and the problem will go away. I expect this may only be a problem until the next release.
Lazy Reading for 2021/01/10
This is a good week for variety; I managed to get historical links, game links, music links, hardware… checking all the boxes except roguelikes, darnit.
- The Design of the Roland Juno oscillators. Nicely explained. (via)
- 50 Years of Text Games, a new year each week, and here’s the post schedule, and of course, 1971: The Oregon Trail. (via)
- Tunguska: Ternary Computer Emulator. (via)
- How Graphviz thinks the USA is laid out.
- 7-screen laptop, from a year ago. (via)
- Christmas Cards The Unix Way – with pic and troff. (video)
- Systems design explains the world: volume 1.
- Our alerts are quiet most of the time (as they should be). I wish this was more common.
- The 100 Best Albums of 2020. You will find something unexpected in there. (via)
- Repairing and bootstrapping an IBM PC/AT 5170, Part 3.
- Embedding an SQL injection into a company name. (via)
- The Immortal Soul of an Old Machine, 40th anniversary review of The Soul of a New Machine. (via)
- Now here’s a geek watch.
- ASCII Weather Station.
- ECC RAM and why it’s useful.
- Intellivision returns. (via)
- Plaintext HTTP in a Modern World.
In Other BSDs for 2021/01/09
This bulked up fast this week.
- Xfce 4.16 has landed in FreeBSD ports. (via)
- List of some Shell goodies for OpenBSD. (via)
- GNU Date and several versions of RFC 3339 dates.
- Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator. (via)
- FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM. (via)
- Remote work notes from a longtime BSD developer. (via)
- pkgsrc-2020Q4 released.
- HardenedBSD December 2020 Status Report.
- Submitting to dmesgd with curl. (via)
- sysctl parameter
kern.video.recordadded to -current. - Self-host a password manager on OpenBSD.
- Valuable News – 2021/01/04.
- BSD Tip: adding a new user.
- GZDoom on OpenBSD using Intel Vulkan.
- Recommendations for an emulation focused OBSD Gaming Rig?
vkernels broken for now
MAP_VPAGETABLE has been removed in DragonFly because of conflicts with recent pmap work. This has the unfortunate effect of breaking vkernel(7), but vkernels can be resurrected with changes to use hardware virtualization support.
Note that running DragonFly as a VM is unaffected; that’ll still work just fine. This breakage is DragonFly-vkernel-on-DragonFly specific.
BSD Now 384: In memoriam
This week’s BSD Now talks about the usual hardware, but also gets into the recently announced Allen K. Briggs scholarship.
timeout(1) in DragonFly
Aaron LI has ported timeout(1) to DragonFly. It’s a way to run a command with a time limit, and I’m happy to say it is a cross-BSD item, coming from NetBSD by way of FreeBSD.
NYCBUG meeting, tomorrow
It’s online, so everyone can go to “Chatting About TLS and Orcs, by Michael W. Lucas“, tomorrow night. I’m putting this reminder the day before because you have to mail rsvp@lists.nycbug.org to get the Zoom invite.
A bunch of updates for DragonFly
I’m doing a catch-up post here to note all the smaller updates, some cross-BSD, that have gone into DragonFly in the last week or two: openresolv 3.12.0, dhcpcd 9.4.0, tzdata2020f, 802.11 channel definitions, stdbuf(1) and libstdbuf(3), sockaddr_snprintf(), and getaddrinfo(1).
Lazy Reading for 2021/01/03
End of year reviews are showing up; probably more next week.
- Core Dump Central. Versions of rogue, plus online!
- Unboxing the best gift of 1983: the Commodore SX-64.
- Cabinet Magazine finally has an RSS feed.
- Digitizing 14,000 woodblocks, a webinar. (via)
- And here’s the woodblocks, free to download.
- Fictional videogame stills. (also via)
- Managing my personal server in 2020. Not BSD but much, maybe all of it, translates. (via sorry I lost track)
- Hopefully XScreenSaver can’t crash your car.
- The Complete History Of First-Person Shooters. Linked cause the author is someone I remember reading 20 years ago. (via)
- Séamas O’Reilly’s Bumper Comics Of The Year 2020 Extravaganza. That what used to just be Vertigo has shown up in many comics.(via)
- Systems with JT, “first impression reviews of amateur operating systems”. (via)
- Life at 50. Life the game.
Your unrelated video of the week: Throat Notes, from the same person who did Double King.
In Other BSDs for 2021/01/02
I am happy to be in the new year.
- Most important this week: Chatting About TLS and Orcs, an online NYCBUG speaker event with Michael W. Lucas. RSVP so you can see.
- On the way to the first thousand BSD-powered computers in the hardware database.
- BSD Games for Linux. (via)
- Trying OpenZFS 2 on FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE.
- Starting with FreeBSD jails.
- A potted history of UNIX, just up to BSD. (via)
- The FreeBSD 92. Nakatomi Socrates BSD Easter Egg. Followup from last week’s link. (Thanks, D. Ebdrup.)
- The world’s chunkiest card reader.
- Valuable News – 2020/12/28.
- Use Android USB Tethering to Get Internet on FreeBSD. (via)
- It feels like the broad Unix API is being used less these days.
- A Big Sur look for WindowMaker on OpenBSD.
A little commit hook change
You can’t tell directly from the commit message, but committing to DragonFly may trigger a reminder to MFC, based on commit message content. This is thanks to Aaron LI. It’s little, but this sort of automation is a good idea.
BSD Now 383: Scale the tail
This week’s BSD Now has a bunch of “project status report” items – normal reports, not end of year roundups, despite the date. Good reading if you aren’t familiar with the work involved, in any case.
New user and group updater
Aaron LI’s added a pw-update.sh script to DragonFly, for use in automating group and user changes, especially as – someday – part of a binary upgrade.
ADM-3A and DragonFly
So, if you find yourself in possession of an ADM-3A terminal, and want to attach it to a DragonFly machine, here is the /etc/ttys config (viewed on the ADM-3A itself of course) and the front switch settings that worked for me.
Remember, ^h deletes.
Casual CHARMBUG meeting, happening now.
As in, right now, and online, so join in and say hi.
Mirrors update
Thanks to liweitianux, the mirrors page on the DragonFly site has been updated. Check again to see if there’s a mirror near you, if you haven’t looked recently.