If you want to test out the latest (20131218) update to ACPICA, Sepherosa Ziehau’s got a patch for you. This will be good for anyone who wants to use less electricity. (updated to reflect this doesn’t enable deeper C-states as I thought it did.)
ACPI has been updated in DragonFly by Sepherosa Ziehau, to potentially support the very low-power sleep states available with Haswell CPUs.
Note: Sepherosa clarified that the lower power states are not available – yet.
There are no binary packages built for dports, on DragonFly 3.7, for 32-bit machines, at this time. Pierre Abbat found this out. You can build from source, of course, or just use 3.6 packages. Don’t forget -DBATCH to avoid getting asked for build options when building from source.
The OpenBSD Project (Foundation?) needs to pay a large electrical bill for their hosting location. I had mentioned this in a weekend BSD report just before the end of 2013, but the problem is still there and deserves a special mention. It’s possible to contribute directly, or to the I-assume-nonprofit-so-tax-deductible-for-many-people OpenBSD Foundation. You can set up a low but reoccurring Paypal payment for the Foundation, which would be probably unnoticeable for you but very helpful for the organization.
Even if you aren’t booting OpenBSD on anything, you’re using a technology that came out of that project – OpenSSH, pf, your dhcpclient, etc; or using 3rd-party software that received fixes from OpenBSD work. Putting dollars towards this software development is one of the more effective things you can do with your money to help open source.
Markus Pfeiffer has added more of his work on USB4BSD to DragonFly, and a reminder: if you want to try it out, there’s just a few options to set.
I didn’t post this before, and should have: Matthew Dillon posted a summary of all the trackpad improvements he added, and how to make use of the various features.
Warren Postma found that hal and dbus caused a crash in VMWare for DragonFly. The answer is to use moused, not dbus.
Also, if you want to keep a custom or just older package from dports on your system, as karu.pruun did, ‘pkg lock’ is the answer.
There’s a lot this week, so let’s get started:
Git Reference. Not that there isn’t a lot of other documentation out there, but much of what you find is people asking specific questions rather than explanations of procedure. (via)
Movie Code. At least most of these are using legit code, even if it’s often the wrong application. It’s been worse. (See ‘state of the art video’ item) (via)
Unix: 14 things to do or stop doing in 2014. These tips are actually useful and contain no buzzwords.
TrewGrip, another item in my quest for interesting keyboards I don’t use.
4043 bytes to recreate a mid-80s IBM PC. There are less bytes of data in the program than there were transistors in the CPU that it emulates. It can run MS Flight Simulator. It was for the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, which should surprise you not at all. (via)
The World’s Most Pimped-Out ZX81. I don’t think it can run Doom, though.
The Unix Shell’s Humble If. For once, an article that doesn’t just pretend bash is the only shell that exists. (via)
Unix Shell RPG Tutorial. It’s exactly what that combination of words means. (via)
Scientists tell their favorite jokes.
Best programmer jokes, found here where there’s more.
I find these animations slightly hypnotizing. (via)
Technology used to suck even when it was cutting-edge, and we’ll still feel that way in the future. (via)
How did we end up with a centralized Internet?
Software in 2014. The summary is: server side is great, client is not. (via)
Able to be turn on, and that is it. Sci-fi movies ignore where technology comes from.
True Nuke Puke Story. My mine coworkers once did something similar to a copier repairman; got him so worried about going underground that he had a panic attack when he had to step on the hoist. We had to get a new repairman.
Your unrelated link of the week: BIG ENDING FACES! (via)
Running late putting this together… Back to bullets!
- The weekly PC-BSD digest for January 3rd.
- DiscoverBSD’s weekly roundup.
- PC-BSD’s weekly digest.
- Jailing FreeBSD 4 on FreeBSD 10. FreeBSD 4 has been a very long-lived release, so to speak.
- OpenBSD has a new auto-install feature that needs to be tested.
- Julio Merino has plans for his test suite on FreeBSD, and will be giving a tutorial on it at AsiaBSDCon 2014.
- OpenBSD has a new ‘signify’ program for cryptographically signing and verifying files.
- Ingo Schwarze has been implementing various optimizations for mandoc in OpenBSD. gprof helps.
- FreeBSD has updated netmap.
- python-3.2 is probably going to be removed from pkgsrc; it’s redundant to all the other versions.
- FreeBSD’s gcc version is being made more compatible to clang by incorporating some Apple changes.
BSDNow episode 19 is up, titled “The Installfest“. They install DragonFly along with other BSDs, and I haven’t even looked at it yet.
Markus Pfieffer has committed Larisa Grigore’s Google Summer of Code work, “SysV IPC in userspace”. It’s been a bit since the event finished, but it’s in DragonFly now.
BSDTalk 237 has 22 minutes of conversation with George Neville-Neil about The FreeBSD Journal.
For those of you near the NYC area, there’s a NYCBUG meeting tonight at 7 Eastern, with Brian Callahan giving a security-focused crash course in OpenBSD. Tickets for NYCBSDCon 2014, happening on February 8th, are going to be available there for the first time, starting at 6 PM. (and cheaper if you buy in person, too.)
Matthew Dillon acquired one of the Acer c720 Chromebooks recently. There were changes needed for the boot process, for the keyboard, an update from FreeBSD for the ath(4) wireless (g), smbus, and trackpad… but it works now, and he detailed exactly how to get it running, and even upgrade the drive.
‘M M’ had trouble with his “Realtek RTL8191SE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC” on DragonFly some time ago. He was able to get it working, and he documented the somewhat convoluted procedure here.
If you want to track the bleeding edge of DragonFly, which is currently version 3.7, I happened to describe it in a reply to Filippo Moretti, on users@. Long-time users will know this/do this already, but it’s worth repeating just because new users may not realize how easy it is.
The holiday break for most people at the end of the year translated to a lot more material showing up now. We all benefit!
The Year Megaplatforms Ruled The Internet. Online companies aren’t ‘disruptive’ any more; they are the establishment. That didn’t take long. Is it a cycle? I hope so. (via)
Intel XDK. Should be cross-platform enough to work on DragonFly, I bet. (via)
On Hacking MicroSD Cards. Bunnie Huang from 30C3, so it’s in-depth. “In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception.” The microcontroller on the cards is exploitable. (via)
Speaking of 30c3, the recordings are up. (via same place)
Bignum Bakeoff contest recap, from 2001. 512B to return the largest number possible. (via)
Owlbears, Rust Monsters, and Bulettes, oh my! The origin of some of the AD&D Monster Manual monsters. (via)
The Postmodernity of Big Data. I don’t know about the text, but I like the punchcard images.
You are going to be using IPv6, whether you are ready or not. (via, with good discussion)
End Paper Maps. This is ephemera that shan’t survive the Internet, I suppose – but I always did enjoy it. (via)
Understanding the Galaga No-Fire Cheat. I would have loved to do this as a child, but surviving 15 minutes in a coin-op video was nearly impossible, barring (for me) one strange exception. (via)
Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking. (also via)
Remember, The Cloud means that even if companies last, their services may not – even if there’s no other service to replace it. (via)
Eventually, will every program have its own internal upgrading and management code? It seems like it.
New Year’s Resolutions for Sysadmins. Some of these resolutions look forward, some look backward.