Justin Sherrill – DragonFly BSD Digest

2019/11/102019/11/07

Lazy Reading for 2019/11/10

Covering lots of ground this week.

youshouldhaveseenthis.com. Common meme language. (via)
youshouldhaveALSOseenthis.com. More.
How political events affect the files on your computer – timezone files, in this case.
Fraidycat, sort of like an RSS reader but it takes in everything. Watch this project; I am a big fan of Tiny Tiny RSS, but this is a much more accessible approach.
Space Cruiser Orion for the console.
So much for games on Linux. Related, and I can sympathize.
Major Mode for Reading EPUBs in Emacs. This will be handy for someone. (via)
Homebrew Cray-1A. How have I not linked this yet? (via)
Vim Splits and Vim tmux Navigator, two approaches to the same idea. (via)
Announcing sshign. Similar to gpg but less painful, I assume. (via)
Build your own X. (via)
A visit to the Large Scale Systems Museum. Every picture is pretty.
I’m Officially Part of the IndieWeb. Continuation from last week’s small theme. (via)
sql-murder-mystery. It’s exactly what it sounds like. (also via)
Team 6502. (via)
Internet Synthesis Protocol. Good MIDI is actually good. You can probably recognize crap MIDI music, but there’s been entire albums built using MIDI where you may not realize it.
Tangential to that: I think Zappa’s released more albums posthumously than when he was alive.
New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 1: Digging the Trenches.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Orodruin: Ruins Of Eternity. Tolkien-ish doom metal.

2019/11/092019/11/07

In Other BSDs for 2019/11/09

Aaaand back to normal.

FreeBSD 12.1 is released.
ChiBUG is meeting November 12th. I’ll post a reminder.
U2F support in OpenSSH HEAD. Excellent news. (via)
What can software authors do to help Linux distributions and BSDs package their software?
Linux VS open source UNIX. (via)
Stabilization of the ptrace(2) threads continued.
Valuable News – 2019/11/04.
EuroBSDCon 2019 videos available. OpenBSD oriented, but there’s a full playlist for the conference.
OPNsense 19.7.6 released.
New openbsdstore available with 6.6 T-shirts. More wearable than CDs.
Will the Real UNIX Please Stand Up? An abbreviated but decent history.
FuryBSD 12.0-XFCE-11-06-2019-01 released.
asr has been renamed to stub in unwind.conf(5).
Linux Professional Institute Releases BSD Specialist Certification – re BSD Certification Group.
My peertube OpenBSD gaming channel. Peertube is getting popular.
Dead Cells running on OpenBSD.
MidnightBSD 1.2 now available.

2019/11/082019/11/05

A CVE to update for

There’s a vulnerability in file(1), CVE-2019-18218. It’s fixed in current and release versions of DragonFly. Update when you get a chance.

2019/11/07

BSD Now 323: OSI Burrito Guy

This week’s BSD Now has a good mix of historical articles and how-tos, but of course I would think that’s a good mix.

2019/11/062019/10/29

NYCBUG installfest, tonight

NYCBUG is having an installfest tonight, at the usual meeting place. Go, if you are near.

2019/11/052019/11/04

As an example of how old design decisions have lasting effects, the POSIX standard still calls for terminal output to accommodate mechanical delay, as noted in this DragonFly commit – i.e. if output was still a line printer instead of a glass TTY, or, as it is 99.9% of the time today, xterm or puTTY or etc. etc.

2019/11/04

Binary packages and the DragonFly installer

I thought this would happen: the nrelease(7) process can use binary packages to build DragonFly. (For the dports packages, not the base system.) This is very interesting to me, but also useful for anyone who wants to build a custom DragonFly; something I think more people could do.

2019/11/032019/10/31

Lazy Reading for 2019/11/03

I still feel bad about missing a week, even though that’s a self-imposed requirement. In penance, here’s a linkdump.

Cabinet Magazine is blogging and it’s wonderful in a way I haven’t seen in a long time.
First, do no harm… with this software. The Hippocratic License. (via)
BBC BASIC on Twitter. (via)
Conceptronica. (via)
Software Rights, the book. (via)
Solid State: Minnesota’s High-Tech History. Public material, so freely streamed. (via)
Berlin Tea Festival 2019, later this month. I’d go if I was near. (via)
Pay attention to the difference between round() and floor(). (via)
(mini-section about owning your information for the next several links)
Historic Digital Places.
Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours. (via)
Computer files are going extinct. (via previous)
Yahoo Groups going away. Well, technically still there, but not really.
Own your content on social media using the Indieweb. (via)
The IndieWeb Movement: Owning Your Data and Being the Change You Want to See in the Web. (via)
(mini-section over)
The Open Book Project. Open hardware e-reader – not yet complete, so for hacking, not using. (via)
uGlass: an AR module on your glasses. Low-cost, works on existing glasses – I like the idea.
Cutest oscilloscope I’ve ever seen.
Building the Ultimate Roguelike Morgue File, part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
The Hissing of Vintage Tapes. Not mentioned but related: Cr02 tapes, or comfort noise, which I did not know exists in an RFC. It’s funny to think of having a standard way to present what is normally a defect.
An old-school shell hack on a line printer. (via)
This Time, There Really Are NO IPv4 Internet Addresses Left. (via) My main workplace is sitting on a public /24, which shows how long ago it was obtained.
Cluster SSH – Manage Multiple Linux Servers Simultaneously. Those who do not remember expect are doomed to recreate it. (via)
Rotary Dial Phone Revival – 4 – Final. (via)
Text Editing Hates You Too. (via)
The $15 Sous-Vide Cooker. Save $50, burn the house down, is what this says to me.
How “special register groups” invaded computer dictionaries for decades.
One Page Dungeon Generator. Fun just to reload and read and reload and read, like a super-short story generator. (via)

2019/11/022019/11/01

In Other BSDs for 2019/11/02

I still haven’t caught up, natch, but not going to miss this week!

Humble Book Bundle: Linux & BSD Bookshelf by No Starch Press. Includes books I’ve linked before; you get a lot of material for only $15.
NYCBUG is having an installfest this Wednesday, 11/6. Go just to see what oddball hardware someone drags out.
The Call for Participation for the FOSDEM 2020 BSD devroom is up. You’ve got about 3 weeks to get your proposal in.
FreeBSD 2019Q2 status report.
FreeBSD 11.2 EOL as of a few days ago.
RPI/Pinebook and BSD compatibility, a current status.
Semibug topics for next year. Keep going through the thread; A HAMMER2 talk would be nice.
Speaking of Semibug, the November 19th meeting may be moved. I’ll post when I hear of the final spot, too.
bzflag, runs on any BSD, still active.
Anyone use FreeNAS for file server?
Arm to Deliver CHERI-based Prototype to Tackle Security Threats. Related to CHERIBSD. (via)
Valuable News – 2019/10/28.
How to fuck up software releases. Linked cause the DragonFly release document is essentially a list of ways to keep me from repeating the mistakes I made on the last release.
Stabilization of the ptrace(2) threads.
EuroBSDCon 2019, Norway – video. (via)
Unix: A History and a Memoir. (via)

2019/11/012019/10/31

New to me baud rates

After 56k, I stopped paying attention, but apparently there’s stated baud rates of 460,800 and 921,600. And your DragonFly terminal can handle them, too.

2019/10/31

BSD Now 322: Happy birthday, Unix

This week’s BSD Now covers some releases, some history, and the very useful tool sshuttle, a VPN alternative.

2019/10/30

nrelease(7) changes

This may be of most interest to me, since I’m usually the one building DragonFly releases. nrelease(7), which is used to build each release of DragonFly, now sticks to the default kernel config, and may use binary packages in the future. There’s some other changes but these are the ones I can describe most exactly; there might be more on the way.

2019/10/29

New zlib, new dhcpcd

zlib and dhcpcd are both updated in DragonFly… but my quick perusal of the commits makes it sound like bugfix only; no usage changes needed.

2019/10/28

Coffee Lake, corepower(4)

Do you have a Coffee Lake Intel CPU? Cause corepower(4) in DragonFly now supports it.

2019/10/252019/10/25

No In Other BSDs, Lazy Reading this weekend

I didn’t get them put together early, and I won’t have time – sorry! It’s the first time I’ve missed it in a long time.

2019/10/25

No longer KMS, in name

If you were used to kldloading i915kms(4) and radeonkms(4)… they are now named i915 and radeon, respectively.

2019/10/24

BSD Now 321: The Robot OS

BSD Now 321 returns to the interview format, talking with Trenton Schulz about things I know about (FreeBSD) and things I did not (Robot OS).

2019/10/232019/10/21

PAM perturbed

Pluggable Authentication Modules on DragonFly have gone through some changes. pam_ssh has been removed, along with pam_tacplus, and pam_radius, in favor of the more frequently updated versions in dports. ppp(8) still supports radius, though.

2019/10/222019/10/21

HAMMER2 emergency space mode

As anyone who has been running HAMMER1 or HAMMER2 has noticed, snapshots and copy on write and infinite history can eat a lot of disk space, even if the actual file volume isn’t changing much. There’s now an ‘emergency mode‘ for HAMMER2, where disk operations can happen even if there isn’t space for the normal history activity. It’s dangerous, in that the normal protections against data loss if power is cut go away, and snapshots created while in this mode will be mangled. So definitely don’t leave it on!

2019/10/21

os-release file appears

There’s now (well, for DragonFly 5.7 users) an /etc/os-release file to show the installed DragonFly version. This is similar to the de facto Linux standard, which of course evolved separately from the not-consistently implemented general standard. Evolved cross-platform standards are fine with me.

Author: Justin Sherrill