December 2020 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2020/12/31

BSD Now 383: Scale the tail

This week’s BSD Now has a bunch of “project status report” items – normal reports, not end of year roundups, despite the date. Good reading if you aren’t familiar with the work involved, in any case.

2020/12/312020/12/30

New user and group updater

Aaron LI’s added a pw-update.sh script to DragonFly, for use in automating group and user changes, especially as – someday – part of a binary upgrade.

2020/12/302020/12/31

ADM-3A and DragonFly

ADM-3A front console switches — It took me a while to figure out you have to press down on the switch, not rotate.

So, if you find yourself in possession of an ADM-3A terminal, and want to attach it to a DragonFly machine, here is the /etc/ttys config (viewed on the ADM-3A itself of course) and the front switch settings that worked for me.

Remember, ^h deletes.

2020/12/29

Casual CHARMBUG meeting, happening now.

As in, right now, and online, so join in and say hi.

2020/12/292020/12/26

Mirrors update

Thanks to liweitianux, the mirrors page on the DragonFly site has been updated. Check again to see if there’s a mirror near you, if you haven’t looked recently.

2020/12/282020/12/26

Multi-volume support in HAMMER2

If you remember HAMMER1’s ability to create a volume that spanned multiple local disks, that capability’s been introduced to HAMMER2. Look at the commit message to see how it works so far.

Note that this is not multi-master replication.

2020/12/272020/12/25

Lazy Reading for 2020/12/27

I haven’t had many posts this past week because of a mix of work then holidays. but there’s always Lazy Reading.

My favorite essays of life advice.
Lode Runner.
“just don’t use any non-essential cookies“
Cemetery of Soviet computers. Gotta reinstall STALKER. (via)
“Tell me you work in tech without telling me you work in tech.” (via)
Social shell games.
Web Conversation From the Other Side. Followup from last week.
A Book Like Foo: Powerful Book Recommendations. (via)
Smalltalk Zoo: Stories and simulations around the evolution of Smalltalk. (via)
Christmas Demos.
Repairing and bootstrapping an IBM 5170 PC/AT, part 1 and part 2.
New Montague Portal novel: “Drinking Heavy Water”.

2020/12/262020/12/25

In Other BSDs for 2020/12/26

Lots of history this week.

2020/12/25

BSD Now 382: Q&A 2020

There’s an Q&A session for this week’s BSD Now. I haven’t looked carefully enough to see if this is the last for the year, but there’s some fun what-are-you-running-at-home material in there.

2020/12/212020/12/25

DRM update to 4.15.18

DRM in DragonFly has been updated to match Linux 4.15.18, along with recognizing some new hardware.

2020/12/202020/12/17

Lazy Reading for 2020/12/20

This week’s links are all fun, but you had better have some time to read.

The Nethack story of Sery the tourist and Sery on the 7th floor.
Concentrichron. (via)
MAX HEADROOM 10\u0027 4\” Two levels of ironic there.
The Making of Donkey Kong on the Atari 2600. (via)
XScreenSaver 5.45 is out. New hacks, frustrating stories.
The Be Book…in lovely HTML. (via)
Web Conversations With the Year 2000. (via)
Music Video Roundup. From arguably the golden age of music videos.
Rick Priestley Uses This.
What’s the Value of Hackable Hardware, Anyway? Begs the question, but the details of building a 6-key Braille keyboard are neat.
Precursor’s Mechanical Design. “Single-crystal diamond milling”.
Winners of the 2020 IFComp. (via)

Your unrelated music of the week: Shimmer, Then Disappear.

2020/12/192020/12/17

In Other BSDs for 2020/12/19

Working on less traditional BSD links here.

Toward an automated tracking of OpenBSD ports contributions.
Commentary on the MacOS -> FreeBSD article from last week.
BSD Unix Hardware Support Database. (via)
BSD Discord server. More linked in comments.
Become shell literate. Wonderfully not Linux/bash-specific.
There’s always more history. Early BSD work, indirectly.
CentOS killed by IBM – a chance to go new ways?
Set your favorite pager.
OpenBSD on TECLAST F7 Plus.
OPNsense 20.7.7 released.
Valuable News – 2020/12/14.

2020/12/17

BSD Now 381: Shell origins

This week’s BSD Now talks about shell history, Plan 9, and new-to-me ArisbluBSD, so it should be fun.

2020/12/152020/12/14

The real uptime

This won’t affect your day-to-day operation of DragonFly, but it’s interesting: apparently, uptime was always (now minus boot time). If you reset the clock on the machine, however, it would no longer be accurate. Now it is accurate, for a number of utilties.

2020/12/14

re(4) updated

I realized I never followed up on the call for testing: re(4) driver updates from Sepherosa Ziehau were indeed tested and found good, so the driver has been updated.