I almost missed this: There’s a NYCBUG meeting tonight, at 6:45 PM, at the Stone Creek Bar and Lounge in New York City. The presentation will be from Raul Cuza, titled “BSD init(8) and rc(8): Room for Improvement?“. I imagine there will be an opportunity to complain about systemd’s very existence, at this meeting.
UNIX tools are this week’s unintentional theme.
- The many load averages of Unix(es). (via)
- So you want to write a package manager. (via)
- Headshot: A visual history of first-person shooters. (via)
- Tolkien Ipsum. (via)
- Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions. (via)
- The Weird Global Appeal of Heavy Metal. Insert comment about stuffy old newspaper here. (via)
- “Newton fax modems as packing material“
- The Ephemeral Software Collection.
- Are there any nice Unix shells newer than fish?
- An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities. (1989, via)
- What was the first terminal command that really wowed you?
- Do Artists Need Websites? This is why businesses only on Facebook bother me. (via)
- How I Vim. (also via)
Your unrelated robot link of the week: Every new Boston Dynamics robot is creepier than the last.
Look at the ZFS discussions if you want to feel smug as a BSD user.
- Should I use BSD? If so, why?
- Delphi development in FreeBSD.
- OpenBSD and Comic Sans problems. (a sort of background to that?)
- Garbage podcast 14, for February 19th, which I missed linking to before.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/02/22.
- February 2016 status and sponsorship questions.
- OPNsense 16.1.4 released.
- USB-stack broken on Chromebook 2 (CB30)
- GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux. (also found here, via and via)
- Related to that: FreeBSD and ZFS, from the FreeBSD Foundation, quietly pointing out that BSD has been the best place for ZFS for a long time.
- iXsystems Partners with Veeam. (Note to self: get quote before buying that VNXe3150 tray expansion, next week…)
- FreeBSD Storage Summit 2016.
- Speaking on BSD: The Waiting Is the Hardest Part. The photo is funny.
- Setting up your own Package Cluster in MidnightBSD.
Normally I’m just linking to BSDNow, but there’s even more BSD-themed media coming up today: BSDNow 130 is out, titled “Store all the Things“, with an extended summary of the recent Storage Summit.
Garbage episode 15 is out, titled “Compressing with Broccoli“. It notes a lack of activity for Bitrig – I still see commits happening, though.
Bill Yuan has added ‘ipfwsync’ to ipfw3 in DragonFly. As you may expect from the name, it’s a way to sync ipfw3 configurations across multiple devices.
I see this bite people irregularly over the years: if your default shell on login can’t run, what do you do? I’ve seen it happen because of a missing /usr/lib, and it can happen with out-of-date library references, too. There’s several different ways to deal with it:
- Run a shell that can’t have this problem, like /bin/tcsh (the root default).
- Or, rebuild in single-user mode from the console.
- Or, perform the bullet-proof upgrade.
That last one may be useful if your dports setup gets mangled, somehow – though ‘pkg upgrade’ has always worked for me.
Francois Tigeot has again updated Intel i915 video support in DragonFly, bringing it even with what’s in Linux 4.2. This will be very useful for Broadwell and Skylake users, and even Broxton, apparently the newest Atom platform.
Welcome the newest DragonFly committer: Bill Yuan. His ipfw3 work has been going on for a while.
I earn the roguelike tag this week.
- “I built Space invaders into Dwarf Fortress.” Featuring the Almighty Dwarven Calculator. (via)
- Free Lovecraft stories. (via)
- Imagining your future projects is holding you back. Talking about fiction, but this applies to open source work too. (via)
- Happy 25th, Webcam!
- @Play 83: HyperRogue
- Mac System 1.0 (via)
- ASCII cows. (via)
- The website of Bob Bemer, the Father of ASCII. COBOL, too? (via)
- Bell Labs in the 1960s. Note how many women were there. Rementioning. (Thanks, BSD32x)
- The scarcity of college graduates with FOSS experience. The license isn’t the important part where students learn; it’s the workflow: coordinating with others, source control, discussion channels, etc. That’s what isn’t taught enough. (via)
- “Here’s a quant fact: the online space is measurably dumber than it was two years ago.“
- Wired Style: A Linguist Explains Vintage Internet Slang. (via)
- The Lonely Dungeon, the random RPG rulebook generator linked last week, now has random illustrations to go with it. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The Voynich Manuscript and Codex Serahinianus, in PDF form. Ignore the “never-cracked ancient mystery” bit about the Voynich Manuscript, but it’s still interesting to look at.
Keep an eye out for BSD user group meetings in your area – just because I didn’t note it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
- “FreeBSD Filesystem Fun” at March 15th SEMIBUG. The next few months of SEMIBUG speakers are posted there, too.
- Deploying NetBSD on the Cloud Using AWS EC2: Part 1.
- NetBSD on Google’s Compute Engine.
- The OpenBSD Foundation 2016 Fundraising Campaign. (via)
- The Complexity of Doing Things Right in Distributed Board Elections. About the NetBSD elections.
- Using GPIO on the Raspberry Pi. (on NetBSD)
- flashrd 2.0 is out, and there’s a new mailing list location. Here’s the flashrd site to save you looking it up, if it’s new to you. (via)
- When Sony uses FreeBSD for Playstation 4, how much money do they save?
- htop now runs on several BSDs. (via)
- FreeBSD and the recent glibc CVE-2015-7547 vulnerability.
- OPNsense 16.1.3 released.
- PVS-Studio delved into the FreeBSD kernel. (via)
- Registration for AsiaBSDCon 2016 is open. (via)
- pfSense training now available in Europe.
BSDTalk 262 is available, talking with Tex Andrews for 23 minutes about LightZone, “open source digital darkroom software”.
BSDNow 129 is available. Along with the normal news summary, it has an interview with John Marino, the fellow behind DragonFly’s dports system, and author of recently-noted-here synth, which has reached version 1.0.
DragonFly 4.4.2, a bugfix release to 4.4.1, is out. This was mostly prompted by the recent OpenSSL update, but other little fixes have made it in, too. It’s available for download and is probably available at your nearest mirror by now, if you want an image. The release page is updated, and there’s always the Git tag summary for 4.4.2 for the most exact details.
I have DragonFly shirts, helpfully printed up by Sepherosa Ziehau in China. I have a list of people that are interested in shirts, most of whom remembered to give a shirt size. I don’t have anyone’s email address or mailing address on that list.
If you are on that list, send me your mailing address.
The shirts are marked L/XL/XXL/XXXL, but they run smaller than U.S. versions of those sizes. I usually find a U.S. XL shirt baggy, but “XXXL” is the one that fit me, for instance. I’ll do my best to place the appropriate one. This is just an advance apology, since it’s too late to change anything if it turns out tight.
I’ll mail these out as I have the spare cash and time on hand. (I hope most of you live in the continental U.S.)
Rapid topic shifts this week.
- Planning for Disaster. Speed over correctness is all the rage, but also programming inconsequential websites is also all the rage.
- The Lonely Dungeon. Markov-style classic RPG generation, it sounds like.
- The book is out! “@Play: Exploring Roguelike Games”
- The Museum of Endangered Sounds. (via)
- Today in Dialup Visualization News.
- Sound Blaster history.
- Systemd and Where We Want to Take the Basic Linux Userspace in 2016. (via)
- Usborne 1980s computer programming books for kids become free downloads. (via)
- Internet Archive Does Windows. With many options. (via)
- Filter all ICMP and watch the world burn. (via)
- Old British Pathé industrial production films. (via)
Your unrelated tea link of the week: Cuppa Thugs.
Several book links this week.
- Openbsd router, can it run on arm? (via)
- Lumina Desktop Getting Ready for FreeBSD 11.0.
- “FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems” now available! Next two book titles are in there, too.
- “FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” Table of Contents.
- Winter arrivals. (related to previous post)
- Upcoming OpenBSD Security Router/Firewall/Load Balancer Release: Feature Requests Wanted (via)
- Noob gonna install some BSD later today.
- DiscoverBSD for 2016/02/08.
- PC-BSD Devs Release Lumina Desktop 0.8.8 Environment […]
- Kali Vs BSD
- January #MissionComplete Best Story
Thing I should link more regularly: Garbage, a podcast that isn’t specifically about BSD but happens to cover it a lot. I linked to it when it was starting, but didn’t catch new episodes (fixed by finding the RSS feed). There’s been a bunch since then, so you have plenty of listening material now.
If you have a Broadwell system, the drm.i915.enable_execlists tunable added by Imre Vadász may keep your system stable. (thanks, zach on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
BSDNow 128 has an interview of Nick Wolff, the usual roundup of news items, and I’m sure something that matches the title of the episode, but I haven’t listened to it yet.
Rimvydas Jasinskas has consolidated/restored/updated a large number of papers into share/doc on DragonFly. I’m not going to link to his large number of commits, but instead point you at the directory where they all went. There’s a number of design documents in there that date back to 4.4BSD and beyond (and some much newer), which may interest or educate you. Of special note: The Guide to the Dungeons of Doom, for rogue, or the KAME IPv6 implementation notes.