BSDNow 255 doesn’t have an interview, and it doesn’t have interrogative punctuation in the title, either. My typographic issues aside, it covers zero-days, KDE, CI, new Core team for FreeBSD, and more.
SemiBUG meeting tonight
Tonight’s SemiBUG meeting is piggybacking on an Azure User’s Group meeting, same general location. (This is why) Go, if you are near.
Upgrade results, bonus for dragonflybsd.org
Remember the upgrade for dragonflybsd.org machines? It completed, and it’s interesting to see that SSDs have become so easily available that “spinning rust” hard disk drives are only still useful for bulk storage, and even then probably not for much longer.
Another neat side effect: disk usage on developer system leaf.dragonflybsd.org was cut in half, thanks to HAMMER2 dedup/compression. It’s a ‘free’ half-terabyte.
Lazy Reading for 2018/07/15
Oddball things week, this week.
- My favorite apps on F-Droid. All open-source, reviewed.(via)
- Commodore 64 BASIC inside your USB Connector. (via)
- Slack client for Commodore 64 (2016) (via)
- Bud Uglly Design. Goes with Smelvetica last week. (Thanks, Chuck Fry)
- “Now you have ???????? problems” Somewhat evil.
- n-gate Hackernews summaries are snarky-great, especially the last one here. (via)
- Portal Point Generator, a power source for use in Antarctica, or wherever.
- 1,600 pages on the history of computing.
- 2018 IEEE Chip Hall of Fame inductees. Stories for each model. (via)
- Excel Unusual. Animated Excel spreadsheets. Somewhat bonkers. (via)
- BASIC Engine. (also via)
- Terminal Whisperer and Command Line Curiosities, videos both via.
- Fractal Curve Generator.
- Animating “This Is America” on vintage Mac hardware. I did CAD work on similar hardware, years ago. It was slooooooow. (via)
- @Play 86: Interview with Dr. Thomas Biskup, Creator of ADOM.
In Other BSDs for 2018/07/14
Some overflow, and thank goodness cause I don’t have a day without work this week.
- Fixing bufferbloat on your home network with OpenBSD 6.2 or newer. (via)
- Designing the software specification [for 386BSD] (via)
- A question about BSD kernel syscalls/abi.
- Announcing the pkgsrc-2018Q2 release. (via)
- pkgsrcCon 2018 in Berlin – Videos. (via)
- A FreeBSD sysadmin job posting.
- NetBSD 8.0RC2 is out.
- [NetBSD] Kernel Address Sanitizer, Part 2. (via)
- Valuable News – 2018/07/08.
- Introduce ‘auto-join’ to the [OpenBSD] wifi 802.11 stack. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 14 – Configuration – Tint2.
- pkgsrc-2018Q2 packages for illumos now available. (via)
- Michael W. Lucas got interviewed. Have you seen his Patreon video yet? (linked last week) It’s fun.
- Jupiter Broadcasting: Tech Talk Today 281. An interview of Allan Jude from BSDNow.
- Allan also shows up on podcast TechSNAP Episode 373: FreeBSD Already Does That.
- Need ZFS Config Advice.
BSDNow 254: Bare the OS
BSD 254 has no interview but covers lots, including mostly-new-to-me BareOS. Also fun, this washing machine tidbit in their Beastie Bits.
More initrd additions
Aaron LI continues to add to initrd(7): it now has scp, grep, diff, telnet, and 70 (!) more tools, bringing the total to over 200. That’s a lot for a “minimal” rescue image.
dragonflybsd.org upgrades
Various machines in dragonflybsd.org are getting hardware upgrades this week. They aren’t time-consuming, so I daresay it won’t have much effect on uptime.
Lazy Reading for 2018/07/08
50% history, 50% new things that I love about the Internet.
- WELCOME TO ARMAGEDDON! An in-depth exploration of Armageddon MUD, from one of my favorite magazines.
- Gladys Project – Creating an open-source home assistant. (via)
- Today in Computational Necromancy: MOST-POSITIVE-BIGNUM, redux.
- 1990, meet 2018: How far does 20MHz of Macintosh IIsi power go today? (via)
- The Influence of the UNIX® Operating System on the Development of Two Video Games. (PDF, via)
- zevv/bucklespring: emulate the sound of a Model M keyboard. (via)
- Hell is other programmers.
- Did blogs ruin the web? Or did the web ruin blogs?
- There was a time when search engines were a thing. And it seems they still are.
- Jackson and Gregg on optimization.
In Other BSDs for 2018/07/07
Lots of NetBSD links this week relative to usual.
Update: how did I miss this? PkgSrcCon 2018 is happening now in Berlin, and there’s a livestream. (via)
- BSD firewalls pfSense vs OPNsense: technical comparison. (via)
- Valuable News – 2018/06/30.
- 8x slower SCP uploads to OpenBSD (vs FreeBSD).
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 12 – Configuration – Openbox.
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 13 – Configuration – Dzen2. I didn’t know what Dzen was; a configurable status bar.
- Audio improvements for NetBSD 8.1. (via)
- Cinnamon 3.8.2 now available on pkgsrc/wip. A new (to me) desktop. (via)
- New FreeBSD Core Team Elected.
- OPNSense 18.1.11 released.
- MKSANITIZER – bug detector software integration with the NetBSD userland. (via)
- NetBSD 8.0 Release Candidate 2. (via)
- [Question/Poll] – Does your work use BSD? What for?
- databasing and FreeNAS?
- How to deploy an OpenBSD VM in Amsterdam. (via)
- Bringup is Hard. The ‘What not to do’ section is quite correct. (PDF, via)
BSDNow 253: Silence of the Fans
BSDNow 253: no interview, but it covers a range of topics I’d be proud to fit in an Other BSDs post. Of special interest (to me) this week: talking about fanless systems, cause it’s hot in North America, and Pinebooks, cause I still have a small computer fetish.
Some package statistics
The article I linked yesterday about Ravenports got me wondering about what package are most popular. avalon.dragonflybsd.org is the default binary package archive for pkg, and it has httpd logs back to 2013, so I collated some information.
I read out a list of packages, and weighed them according to how recently they were downloaded. I also mushed together all the py/ruby/p5/php numbered packages, and excluded lib*.
After all that… there’s a lot of noise. One install of any desktop environment pulls in hundreds of packages automatically, so it’s hard to tell what’s installed by a human and what’s installed by dependency. That being said, here’s some highlights. This is me applying an arbitrary value and then arbitrarily snipping out a list… but it’s fun to see if nothing else.
18596 python27
13564 xorg-server
13499 perl5
13391 xterm
12098 xorg
8512 cups
8453 bash
8389 ffmpeg
8367 spidermonkey170
7884 python
7432 firefox
6997 sudo
6896 bind-tools
6702 openldap-client
5651 nano
5529 xfce4-conf
5052 xfce
4663 ruby
4447 vim
3133 tmux
2578 chromium
2248 zsh
2175 samba44
2132 python36
2007 mate-desktop
1765 mysql56-client
1699 fluxbox
1690 vim-lite
1517 CoinMP
1407 openjdk8
1395 samba46
1384 lumina
1367 kde
1355 mpg123
1353 spidermonkey24
1340 vlc
1338 thunderbird
1329 wpa_supplicant
1252 firebird25-client
1164 gimp
1103 zip
1083 youtube_dl
1044 php
941 freerdp
931 mercurial
927 lynx
866 evolution
848 gnome3
845 openjdk
842 openbox
842 epiphany
799 nmap
798 go
796 mutt
796 gnuchess
743 apache24
726 rxvt-unicode
722 irssi
652 firefox-esr
652 htop
649 rust
619 smartmontools
575 fvwm
529 windowmaker
477 openvpn
472 synth
451 fish
406 npm
403 inkscape
402 enlightenment
367 firefox-i18n
351 dwm
347 neovim
341 R
339 emacs25
320 emacs
320 unbound
312 tor
310 lua
300 cinnamon
300 wireshark
282 netcat
272 pidgin
258 postfix
258 joe
252 GraphicsMagick
251 dillo
249 icewm
242 mosh
236 rtorrent
225 weechat
219 audacious
218 smtube
216 calibre
190 xmms
187 pdksh
184 redis
184 openssh-portable
183 tk85
173 rdesktop
172 nedit
164 terminator
161 fetchmail
160 KeePassX
156 dnsmasq
A deep dive into Ravenports
eerielinux has written an exploratory article about Ravenports. It’s worth a read; Ravenports has been growing actively. You can install it in parallel with dports on DragonFly, or on a number of other operating systems.
SSH keys and making your life easier
A tip for anyone using public keys in SSH: you can start up your xorg session using ssh-agent and then have all subsequent connections be authorized by the agent, saving you some hassle of password typing, etc. Put this in your ~/.xinitrc :
eval `/usr/bin/ssh-agent -c` (insert line to start up your window manager here) /bin/kill $SSH_AGENT_PID
(Yoinked from Matthew Dillon on IRC) Realistically, you should also lock your terminal or otherwise prevent physical access to any workstation where you do this, since it means immediate SSH access to other systems using your identity, for anyone touching that keyboard.
If you’re using Windows, there’s always Pageant.
initrd work on DragonFly, and a man page for it
Lazy Reading for 2018/07/01
Historic games is this week’s accidental theme.
- Zork I: Storm-Tossed Trees and Getting Out.
- Shooting yourself in the foot in various programming languages. A bit old but still entertaining. (via)
- Monitoring the Fermentation of Sourdough Starter with Computer Vision. I’ve done this with the low-tech approach of a dry-erase marker and a notepad.(via)
- Cool Retro Term. Emulates multiple types! (via)
- Terrible Ideas in Git. Video. (via)
- Hackmud’s 2.0 update introduces 32 player hack offs.
- Best June 2018 on Bandcamp: Metal and Electronic.
- The Brief and Incredibly Poetic Life of Bañec Hazyblockades: a Dwarf Fortress diary.
- The Computer Literacy Project, a series from the BBC, right through the 1980s. (via)
- How Clang Compiles a Function.
- Tetris for Applesoft BASIC. (via)
- Smelvetica. This is one of the meanest things you could pull on someone aware of typefaces and how they work. If you don’t understand just looking at it, you aren’t one of those people. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2018/06/30
Some of this is overflow from last week.
- m:tier subscription service for long-term OpenBSD updates. This is a good idea, connecting a service to the people that want to pay for it – without interfering with the “normal” free usage.
- FreeBSD has lower latency, and Linux has faster application speeds. The comments at the link source may be better.
- A Beginner’s Guide to Firewalling with pf. (via)
- pfSense in VMware Workstation. (via)
- “Would anyone be interested of this tool supported BSD?“
- Using UNIX as IDE. (via)
- FreeBSD 11.2 released.
- HardenedBSD: Feature comparison vs other BSD distros. (via)
- Booting OpenBSD kernels in EFI mode with QEMU. (via)
- Call for testers – Audio improvements for NetBSD 8.1. (via)
- WiFi Refresh. (via)
- Rewards of Up to $500K Offered for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Linux Zero-Days. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 11 – Key Components – Blue Light Spectrum Suppress. I didn’t know about Redshift; I like it.
- Michael W. Lucas has a Patreon account, and a video to go with it. I’ve wondered if I should do something like that for the Digest.
BSDNow 252: Goes to 11.2
The summary for BSDNow episode 252: “FreeBSD 11.2 has been released, setting up an MTA behind Tor, running pfsense on DigitalOcean, one year of C, using OpenBGPD to announce VM networks, the power to serve, and a BSDCan trip report.”
X2APIC enabled by default on DragonFly
DragonFly-current, that is. Some newer multi-processor systems use X2APIC to boot, and DragonFly can now use it.
Lazy Reading for 2018/06/24
I’m going wide-topic this week.
- The Toy That Talked Back. The Speak and Spell.
- About Star Wars in ASCII, which I’ve linked directly to before.
- Edible Games Cookbook: Play With Your Food. A Kickstarter.
- Command-line file-based dedup. (via)
- Genealogy of Elizas. Actual site here. (via)
- Stamping copyright information onto academic papers. The pdftk usage is what I find interesting here. There’s a LOT of tools out there for automatic PDF manipulation.
- Command line audio players.
- Bread is lighter than whipped cream.
- Break down of a C64 demo effect. (via)
- One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla. I’ve seen people keeping vanilla beans in safes. (via)
- A WinRAR joke.
- Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents. The very first sentence is fun.