Lag!

Markus Pfeiffer has imported FreeBSD’s if_lagg to DragonFly.  It’s for talking LACP over multiple network ports, so that the traffic from those multiple ports can be aggregated – if what’s on the other end generally understands LACP.  (Failover mode may not count.)  Please test if you have that sort of surfeit of network ports.

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/28

I have an excellent mix of links this week, I think.  I like to have multiple links on multiple topics.

In Other BSDs for 2014/09/27

Not even trying source links this week; there’s plenty else to link.

Update: EuroBSDCon is livestreaming!  (via)

Bash vulnerability; check your dports

There’s a new bash vulnerability that could be a problem for a network-facing machine that happens to use bash.  (See here for test.)  As a BSD user, you can feel somewhat smugly superior since the default shell is tcsh and therefore it may not affect you – unless you’ve installed it from dports.

John Marino has already updated dports.  A new binary is forthcoming, though you can always rebuild by hand if you don’t want to wait.

Update: oh, wait, not done.

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/21

Lots of links this week.

 

In Other BSDs for 2014/09/20

Low on the source links this week, but there’s plenty else.

Update: from talk@nycbug, George Rosamond gives a nice APU setup summary.

DragonFly as a desktop

There’s been so much work in DragonFly recently that makes a desktop easier (i915 support, dports, and so on), that I decided to resurrect an older Dell machine and use it as my desktop.

The Dell that I’m using is a leftover from someone else’s workplace; it’s 7 years old, and has “only” 4G of RAM and a Core 2 DuoE6600  CPU in it.  It works, however.

Setting up DragonFly and installing xorg and so on is pretty straightforward.  Using dports makes it crazy quick to add all the packages.  I went for XFCE4 because I could.  Starting X gave me some trouble at first; the default config couldn’t find the mouse and would eventually crash.

Running ‘X -configure’ created a xorg.conf file I could edit, and these lines in /etc/rc.conf gave me a working mouse:

moused_enable="YES"
moused_type="auto"
moused_port="/dev/ums0"

The crashing problem with my radeon-driven video card was fixed by turning off the acceleration – uncommenting this line in xorg.conf did it:

Option     "NoAccel"

Video performance isn’t as nice as I would like it with acceleration, but this is an older machine anyway.

I couldn’t get sound working. Francois Tigeot has a branch of DragonFly that contains newer sound drivers brought over from FreeBSD, here:

git://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~ftigeot/dragonfly.git (pcm_2014_september branch.)

It doesn’t support device cloning, so I can run Youtube videos and XMMS, but not audio from both at the same time.  (for instance; not that you’d want to do this other than by accident)

I installed x11/webfonts, and web pages look a bit better after changing my default font preferences.

And… that’s about it.  It’s a working desktop.  Digging up a half-height video card that has working acceleration is a next step, but I can’t imagine that’ll be expensive.  I wish I had done this a long time ago.

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/14

I didn’t even notice, because this has been a difficult week for me, but I’ve hit over 6,000 posts on the Digest. I passed the 11-year mark too, a few weeks ago.

Your unrelated video of the week: Tea Making Tips, from England in 1941.  This 60-year-old WW2-era film is actually one of the better how-to-deal-with-tea guides I’ve ever seen. (via)

In Other Linuxes for 2014/09/13

I’m doing this little extra feature because I ran into several news items over the past week or so that made me say “what the hell?” out loud to my monitor.

Fedora To Get a New Partition Manager.  All?  Almost all? Linux distributions use gparted, which is open source and can be updated.  Why not add to that?  Also, it’s yet another preannouncement about how this new replacement tool will work – it’s not functional yet.

Text streams should be the fallback interface in Unix.  Every 2 or 3 years someone gets this idea in some form – somehow it doesn’t overcome 40+ years of text usage.

Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems.  Nobody can find fault with ideas like easier package management and signing.  (Though maybe having the same upgrade mechanism for base + 3rd party software isn’t a good idea)  However. this answer, coming from part of the group behind systemd, ties all software installation into having a btrfs volume – even requiring a virtual btrfs volume if there isn’t one installed.  Incompatible software versions are dealt with by turning /usr into a sort of container.  That kills any sort of need to interoperate with other software.  And of course it assumes there is no Unix but Linux.  (via)

Grump grump grump.

In Other BSDs for 2014/09/13

This has been a very hectic week for me, but I still have links for you.