August 2020 – DragonFly BSD Digest

There's work being done on a DragonFly hypervisor, based on NVMM. The theoretical next milestone is tomorrow.

No mini-theme; I'm balanced!

The Selectric Typewriter. Belongs to a very specific time. (via)
DIY Single-Chip 2D Retro Game Console. The controller is the console. (via)
Backblaze Hard Drive Stats 2020 Q2. (via)
Vim-like Layer for Xorg and Wayland. (via)
EmacsConf 2020 Call for Proposals. Balanced coverage. (via)
Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches. (via)
Brothers Quay Day. (via)
ROBLOX is a MUD: The history of virtual worlds, MUDs & MMORPGs. (via)
The Golden Age of computer user groups. (via)
A nuclear powered laser to melt a tunnel from NYC to London, a serious proposal. (via)
Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-ons? (via)
Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e. D&D. (via)
Chairigami, all-cardboard furniture. Not the first time I have seen this idea, but well-implemented. (also via)
Mixed-radix fractions in Bengali.
Embrace, extend, and finally extinguish - Microsoft plays their hand. AKA, use sourcehut over github.
OSDI goes annual. Yes, there's that much operating system research happening after decades. That makes me happy.
The first 4 hours of MTV. Argh nostalgia for a better and worse time. (via)

No theme, but plenty of variety.

A reimplementation of NetBSD based on a microkernel.
Valuable News – 2020/08/24.
“TLS Mastery” Covers Reveal, with T-shirts and Posters.
TrueNAS 12.0 beta out.
MidnightBSD 1.2.7 out.
pkgdb belongs in libdata, not var. Them's fightin' words!
rc.d belongs in libexec, not etc. Them too!
GhostBSD financial reports. I like seeing this out in the open. (via)
What is the oldest BSD? Not as short an answer as you may think. (via)
Tarsnap podcast episode with FreeBSD ex security officer Colin Percival. (via)
From 8' to 4": massive pkgsrc performance gain by replacing a shell script with awk.

Vincent DEFERT put the DragonFly handbook and other notes into epub format, and you can download them now.

This week's BSD Now is a nice round number, 365, and covers all sorts of subjects. I like the command line tools vs Hadoop link.

I didn't know this, but the label in disklabel(8) is called "pack ID" in the man page, and there's only one way to update it right now in DragonFly. You may only need to know this a few times in your life.

Something I didn't know but also never tried: ttyv0, the base terminal when booting up DragonFly, can extend to a max of 160 characters. Given that I am used to 80, that seems like overkill.

As part of installing DragonFly, Jonathan Engwall happened to create a script to install every part of xfce4 that he wanted. I'm linking to it in case you want it too. (xorg and web browser install not included)

No accidental theme this week.

Princess Bride + Oracle. You will laugh if you recognize all the components.
The Infinity Modules Player: Never Turn Off Your Amiga Again.
aboutfeeds.com. (via, via)
Inside a counterfeit 8086 processor. I've seen faked capacitors, too.
Best "Business-Grade" Laptop.
In search of the perfect pocket device. (via)
‘use this power wisely’: Big list of http static server one-liners. (via)
Donald Knuth's email regime. (via)
Dependency.
MacSnap RAM Upgrade for Macintosh 512Ke.
Tech hardware fails, as written in 2012.
How Game Titles Work.
Donglevision.

Started this with overflow from last week.

For those with a different keyboard layout - different than US English, I mean - and running xorg 1.20 or later: setxkbmap is the command you need.

This week's BSD Now talks about a bunch of different hardware platforms.

If you have an AMD processor, support for the System Management Network and CPU temperature readings are now available in DragonFly as amdsmn(4) and amdtemp(4).

Instead of posting about updates, here's a feature that you will hopefully never notice: 'make upgrade', part of the upgrade process in DragonFly, will now go look for 3rd party software built to depend on deprecated DragonFly system libraries, before removing those libraries. (details) If you've had a program stop running because something else was upgraded - and I'm sure you have, cause "dll hell" is an actual phrase - you'll be thankful for this.

I keep posting about how Daniel Fojt is updating basic utilities in DragonFly, and he keeps doing more of it - OpenSSH, bmake, and dialog. Some of them are multiyear jumps, and his commit messages nicely summarize the more dramatic changes.

Unofficial theme this week is open source project contribution.

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels. Far more in-depth than you may expect. (via)
Online text to diagram tools. More comprehensive than you may expect. (via)
tech brain. (via)
Embrace the Complexity, related to the previous link. (via)
"Running a successful open source project is just Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights." (via)
I want to contribute to your project, how do I start?
The Sifter, a searchable database of historical cookbooks. Huge in scope and not designed to extract money; very different from many projects today. (via)
Mumford’s treasure map. Math via squiggles. (via)
Random Coinage Generator, and a d100 table of ways to open secret doors. (via)
An Amiga Sampler 30 Years Later. (via)
Retracing the Roland Sound in Hip-Hop. (via)
Superhero League of Hoboken. Meretzky, post-Infocom.

Check the BSDCan videos this week; there's more than a day's worth of material right there.

BSDCan 2020 videos. (via)
File handling in Unix: tips, traps and outright badness. Not only BSD. (via)
My views on some conventions for Unix command line options, followed by Unix options conventions are just that, which makes them products of culture. Related to last week's options links.
A Generation Lost in the Bazaar. 2012 but still accurate. (via)
EvilQuest on OpenBSD.
FreeBSD and Jails at BSD Rennes, an event I did not know about. Here's more.
Drawing Pictures The Unix Way - with pic and troff.
Valuable News – 2020/08/10.
Recovering 2.11BSD, fighting the patches.
LLVM 10.0.0 imported into -current.
NetBSD on the NanoPi NEO2. (via)
GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, second evaluation report.
GSoC 2020 Second Evaluation Report: Curses Library Automated Testing.

For those of you who like csh, or are too lazy to switch away from it, it now includes the current directory in the prompt on DragonFly. Another of those "hey, this can still get updates?" moments for me.

This week's BSD Now links to recent items on the UNIX way of tools, which is certainly a source of endless thinkpieces but also good history to know.

If you're running a very recent HP laptop, this recent DMAP change may get DragonFly to boot on it. EDIT: this MSIX fix, too.