October 2020 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2020/10/312020/10/30

In Other BSDs for 2020/10/31

Spooky Halloween BSD News! Well, not really.

Dual Boot FreeBSD and Linux from Single ZFS Pool. (via)
The FreeBSD k8s-bhyve Project – Looking for Free Testing Equipment. (via)
Bluetooth Audio on OpenBSD. (via)
Contributions over 28 years of NetBSD src history. (via)
History of FreeBSD – Part 2: BSDi and USL Lawsuits. (via)
Lenovo T420 FreeBSD Tweaks. Still valid; hardware still exists. (via)
Use a raspberry-pi 2 as a firewall with FreeBSD. (via)
Automating OpenBSD Vultr VM deployment with Ansible. (via)
Default OpenBSD Web Server. Out on GitHub, not within the main repo? (via)
How the OpenBSD -stable packages are built.
Port of the week: rclone.
OpenVPN as default gateway on OpenBSD.
FreeBSD 12.2 is out.
Realtek RTL8188CUS – USB 802.11n WiFi Review.
OPNSense 20.7.4 released.
Valuable News – 2020/10/26.
BSD hardware trends. (via)
Video: C Programming on System 6 – Porting OpenBSD’s diff(1).

cpdup and symlinks

cpdup(1) will now exactly recreate symlinks. That may be helpful for your backup strategy if it already involves cpdup.

BSD Now 374: OpenBSD’s 25th anniversary

This week’s BSD Now is all about releases – OpenBSD, NetBSD, BastilleBSD…

sysmouse fixes everything

Well, it doesn’t fix anything, but it seems like an answer that almost always helps: running sysmouse usually fixes most X11 mouse problems.

DragonFly and clang10

You can now use compilers.conf(5) to switch to clang10/llvm10 for building Dragonfly. Untested yet!

2020/10/252020/10/21

Lazy Reading for 2020/10/25

Two shopping months until Christmas!

I’ll take “problems we solved correctly in the 80s” for $100, Alex.
Come Internet With Me: Zettelkasten method.
Building a computer in Conway’s game of life. (via)
MONOSPACE, less than 1kb of code. (via)
archive.assembly.org, so many short films, related to the last link.
The HTML5 accelerator card.
Basic Unix Tools – dd.
Why I Chose Emacs as My New Text Editor. (via)
Replacing FreshRSS With Miniflux. (via)
SSH 2FA with Google Authenticator and Yubikey. (via)
2.1 Million of the Oldest Internet Posts Are Now Online for Anyone to Read. i.e. USENET. (via)
introducing the i.webthings directory. Find some spare time before following that link; there’s a lot there.

2020/10/242020/10/22

In Other BSDs for 2020/10/24

It’s apparently release week?

Switching Xorg Keyboard Layout on OpenBSD. (via)
BSDCan 2021 is canceled.
NetBSD 9.1 released.
OpenBSD 6.8 Released.
REDCOM Sigma. FreeBSD-based product, and my employer.
TrueNAS 12.0 released.
Valuable News – 2020/10/19.
FreeBSD Q3 2020 report.
FreeBSD GNOME 3 Fast Track.
Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD.
how to play celeste with sound—sort of. AKA getting fmod to play on a BSD.
People asking about FreeBSD licencing.
OpenBSD 6.8 introduces a new hardware database client program.
Minecraft; and on FreeBSD!

BSD Now 373: Kyle Evans Interview

This is the most straightforwardly-named BSD Now in a while: it’s an interview of Kyle Evans talking about his projects in FreeBSD.

kernel vs. userland check

This seems so minor, but such a good idea: a regular check to make sure kernel and userland are in sync.

libedit update in DragonFly

Daniel Fojt’s updated libedit in DragonFly; not huge, but I mention it cause I’ve seen the very first bug fixed in the commit listing; garbled history.

Existential structural tracking in DragonFly

Matthew Dillon added “existence locks” to DragonFly, which as usual he committed with a long, descriptive message.

2020/10/182020/10/16

Lazy Reading for 2020/10/18

Some esoteric gems this week.

Derek Muller’s video on Penrose Tilings. One of those useful patterns to name, like Markov chains.
B3 Biennale – Panel on computer game history of the Eastern Bloc.
Something to think about: the longest-running computer ever built is also the farthest away.
FTP Fadeout.
SAILDART, an e-book. Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab Dump and Restore Tape Program, which gives you an idea of the history it covers. (via)
Developing Multitile Creatures in Roguelikes. That… is a problem that sorta upends some basic assumptions.
“More Lively Counterfaits” Experimental Imaging at the Birth of Modern Science.
Psion Series 3 palmtop EReader.
Oxide Computer Company. Building their own computer, plus their blog has neat logo entries and podcast talks. (via)
System 6 programming, by joshua stein. I just like seeing a fat mac in use.
Super Merryo Trolls or An Adventure From The Days Before VRAM. (via)

2020/10/172020/10/16

In Other BSDs for 2020/10/17

This list of links runs in the same order of the BSD RSS feeds in my reader. What a coincidence!

pkgsrc-2020Q3 released.
The FreeBSD Town Hall was Wednesday and I didn’t post about it in time, but previous Town Halls are available.
Oldschool Gaming on FreeBSD.
Valuable News – 2020/10/12.
OpenBSD Laptop. (via)
Cryptographic Signing using ssh-keygen(1) with a FIDO Authenticator.
RETGUARD for powerpc and powerpc64 added to -current.
How to open source: going from NetBSD to Linux.
Michael W. Lucas is having a book sale.

A little more in uname

There’s now -K (kernel) and -U (user env) options to uname. Minor, but good to know the change.

BSD Now 372: Slow SSD scrubs

This week’s BSD Now has the usual roundup, with I think the highlight being a discussion of how SSDs can sometimes still not be fast enough for a ZFS scrub, depending on how it’s scheduled.

ChiBUG meeting, now

The ChiBUG monthly meeting has gone virtual, so go now if you are interested. The thread about it also includes some notes on how to connect under BSD that may be useful beyond this immediate event.

sh as cross-pollination tool

I always thought of cross-pollination – sharing of code between BSDs – as a good thing. This seems like the most basic way to do that: same base sh.

2020/10/112020/10/08

Lazy Reading for 2020/10/11

I guess history is a micro-theme?

Think Twice Dice. (via)
Happy Birthday, Ethernet. Still interoperable, 40 years later. (via)
How we ran a Unix-like OS (Xv6), on our home-built CPU with our home-built C compiler. Sorta UNIX. (via)
“Myst” demake for Apple II. (via)
Ars Electronic 2017. Follow the art links.
Spamtoberfest.
Related, Hacktoberfest needs to stop.
IFComp 2020 games are up.
Transport Tycoon.
New Object Storage Protocol Could Mean the End for POSIX. (thanks, Matthew C)
Retry Mock Toys, Or, model rockets are fun.
The Digital Future of Tabletop Games. (via)
Dispatch 09 — Synthetic Reality & The Metaverse. (also via)
A Nixie Tube Watch. Exactly as clunky as it sounds.
Welcome to your Bland. (via)

2020/10/102020/10/08

In Other BSDs for 2020/10/10

I should have set this to post at 10:10AM GMT.

OpenBSD Amsterdam Podcast interview. (via)
duf – a user friendly alternative to df. Works on BSD. (via)
Old School Disk Partitioning. (via)
Why the Unix newgrp command exists (sort of),
How the Unix newgrp command behaved back in V7 Unix, and People still use newgrp (to my surprise), touching BSD history.
FreeBSD laptop advice.
The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 5).
Valuable News – 2020/10/05.
FreeBSD 12.2-RC1 Available.
How to Recover From a BIOS Upgrade. Putting your boot sector back.
FreeBSD Subversion to Git Migration: Pt 2 Primer for Users.
fnaify 3.0 released.

BSD Now 371: Wildcards running wild

This week’s BSD Now talks about ZFS, TrueNAS, IPC, wildcards, and the UNIX family tree, for a mix of the old and new.