If you’re using one of those Acer C720 or C720p Chromebooks with DragonFly, remember to set:
machdep.mwait.CX.idle=AUTODEEP
To automatically enter the right power-saving states on the CPU. You used to have to do it manually, and now you don’t.
Sascha Wilder ported over the urio(4) driver to DragonFly. It’s for the USB-based Rio mp3 players. Does anyone have one of these and is running DragonFly? That would be a startling coincidence.
Today is my birthday, so I have a gift for you: a lot of reading!
- Don’t panic and keep forking Debian. It leads to devuan.org. For a fork to succeed, they need positive reasons to exist, not just a definition of what it’s not. (via)
- Advent Planet. Follow it, find your interest topic, get something to read daily for the next few weeks.
- On file formats, very briefly. I’ve liked everything of Paul Ford’s that I’ve ever read. (via)
- Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES (via) 6502 chips are so universally hacked on, it seems.
- Bumper Sticker Computer Science. More “epigrams”. Some dated, some excellent. (PDF, via)
- ParkyTowers thin clients. Turning very cheap, very small hardware into usable systems.
- The Odd History of the First Erotic Computer Game. See Softalk link below too. (via)
- Chart Brut: How the MS-Paint Graphics of Conspiracy Took Over the Web. (via)
- Grand St. short-run consumer tech for sale, very much like outgrow.me.
- A Plan 9 Newbie’s Guide. (PDF, via) Coraid uses/used Plan 9?
- The strange world of computer-generated novels. (via)
- Why my book can be downloaded for free.
- Smile, You’re Speaking EMOJI. (via)
- The Softalk Apple Project.
- Unix: tricks with history.
- Clip Art is dead. Awww.
- RowHammer. Ugh. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak’s Adult Swim 2014 compilation.
I have been building up quite the variety this week.
- Bitrig 1.0 has been released.
- Writing NetBSD Sound Drivers in Haskell. (PDF, via)
- ruBSD 2014, happening December 13th in Moscow. (via)
- How to configure full disk encryption in PC-BSD 10.1. (via)
- BSD Magazine for November 2014. (via) Why don’t they put new issue announcements in their RSS?
- A week of pkgsrc #5.
- FreeBSD Foundation’s 2014 year-end fundraising.
- FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials is hitting the printers. There’s a quiet mention of the next two books in that series, too.
- Two new kernel errata for OpenBSD.
- BSDCan 2015 (June 2015) has opened up its call for papers, now through Jan 19th, 2015. (via)
- A conversation about UTF-8, Unicode, and file systems.
- A conversation about random vs. phrase passwords.
- New Directions in Operating Systems conference notes. Lots of BSD stuff in there. (via)
- nih-0.13.0 is out for pkgsrc.
- BSD presentations (including DragonFly) at the X Developers Conference. I mentioned the event itself before, but that link wasn’t open to non-subscribers until later, as pointed out to me.
- Coreboot on the BSDs.
- More talk about embedded OpenBSD on cheap machines, including thin client machines repurposed into routers.
- Noticed in that previous link: <$100 Ubuquiti EdgeRouter-Lites can run OpenBSD? FreeBSD too, apparently.
- Is it time to give BSDs a try?
- Fixing PC-BSD upgrade issues.
This page, Varialus et Anisoptera, set up by… I’m not sure of the real name but it’s ‘varialus’ on IRC – has a detailed description of the DragonFly install process and installation of MATE, plus extra notes. I always find these sorts of cheatsheets entertaining.
The 66th BSDNow episode has an interview with Paul Schenkeveld about BSD conferences, and of course the usual variety of news, including something about a BSD-powered library in Africa; something that is entirely out of the blue to me.
The DragonFly boot menu has been cleaned up a bit, and Fred, the dragonfly drawn on DragonFly, is now in better color. In fact, there’s even an option to turn him blue.
Update: I wanted to see what this looked like, and I realized screenshots might help everyone else.
In an effort to reduce my backlog of DragonFly things to post about, here’s quick notes:
- The path to xauth is now configurable, though correct by default. (that’s bit me in the past)
- There’s a new callout*() implementation.
- cpuctl(4) has been imported to allow CPU microcode updates.
- libm has been updated with math functions from FreeBSD and NetBSD, which because of library versioning support, won’t cause compatibility problems for older vs. newer DragonFly versions.
- C++11 support is also now available.
I’m running behind so this is a bit old, but: Matthew Dillon commited svc(8), a service manager program. Take a look at its man page to see the potential uses.
Robin Hahling wants feedback on where to go in DragonFly with rcrun(8), service(8), and similar commands. Follow the thread to see the various opinions.