For those of you that are very bandwidth-constrained, or just impatient, there are xz-compressed images of DragonFly 4.4 available. (see ‘download live image’ area) The mirrors should have them too.
The latest episode interviews Robert N. M. Watson and George V. Neville-Neil for 36 minutes, about teachbsd.org. Also, BSDTalk has been running for 10 years! It’s been long enough I couldn’t remember if it started before the Digest.
Finally, a week of links you can get through in one sitting.
- Old stuff that rocks. (via)
- The itch.io app for indie games. It’s open source – could run on BSD, maybe? (via)
- How I Paid My Rent by Publishing the Most Disgusting Things on the Internet. I remember PoE! The ‘Chet’ he refers to is 1/2 of Old Man Murray. (via)
- Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace. (via)
- Chw00t: Breaking unices’ chroot solutions. (via)
- Tiny Letters to the Web We Miss. (via)
- Works that Work, a magazine. Cabinet-ish. (also via)
- Six months with a dumbphone.
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics. (Thanks, Siju)
- Procedural Castle Generation, which I find compelling for some reason. (via)
Yet another week that I started 2 weeks ago; this end-of-calendar-year is full of BSD goings-on.
- FreeBSD on the desktop? Am I crazy? (via)
- lists.freebsd.org holy jeebus….
- I am a newbie trying to switch from pfSense to OpenBSD.
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Windows Operating System Family. (via)
- You Make FreeBSD Possible.
- Adventures in Open Source Software: Dealing with Security. A pkgsrc talk.
- TrueNAS templates are now included with a number of monitoring tools.
- Michael Lucas’s SSH talk on YouTube. Not necessarily BSD-specific, but still good.
- BSD for the desktop user: A review of PC-BSD.
- What makes the BSD family more secure than GNU/Linux?
- SO_REUSEADDR and SO_REUSEPORT, a BSD-origin explanation. (via)
- The pkgsrc-2015Q4 freeze has started.
The DragonFly installer has been modified to produce disk arrangements that will generally match between UFS and Hammer installs, plus directories where you usually don’t want Hammer history or backups (like /tmp or /usr/obj) are now under /build and null-mounted to where you’d expect, since null-mounting works transparently well on DragonFly. Matthew Dillon has a note explaining the whole thing.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a new version of drivers for em/emx(4) and igb(4). The initial versions had trouble, but testing is ongoing. Try it if you have the correct hardware.
Update: never mind.
The official title for BSDNow 120 is “I’m talking about the man in the middle” which is too long for an article title here. It’s a Michael Jackson reference and a type of attack against encryption, if you are unclear. Anyway, the episode has the usual news roundup and an interview of Pawel Jakub Dawidek.
For those of you looking to rent a place to run DragonFly, Nuno Antunes has very helpfully written out his procedure for installing DragonFly on a Digital Ocean ‘droplet’.
If you have a em(4), emx(4), or igb(4), Sepherosa Ziehau would like you to try out his Intel NIC driver update. He’s already updated the ix(4) driver to support more hardware.
As mentioned previously, Sepherosa Ziehau is printing up some DragonFly T-shirts for WeChat users. He’s going to have a few left over, so he is sending them to me to hand to non-China people. If you want one, leave a note saying so in the comments. Here’s the front and back.
You need to provide some way for me to contact you – preferably email, and the size you’d want. (Use the Land’s End Men’s Shirts chart for sizing, because why not.) I’ll only have a few, so no guarantees.
Update: I have more responses than probable shirts at this point – sorry! I’ll get in contact with each of you once the shirts come in and arrange delivery.
It’s tonight at 7 PM, with the details found on the NYCBUG mailing list. RSVP as soon as you can if you are near enough to go – and you should go.
A good chunk of this is brought over from last week, cause there was so much.
- Ramsey Theory in the Dining Room. Not the shouty chef. (via)
- Superpersistent bootkit. (PDF, via, via)
- Raspberry Pis stuffed into classic computer shells. (via)
- I Dreamed of a Perfect Database. “This is a risk of working alone, without anyone to tell you you’re insane.” A Paul Ford article. (via)
- Project: Keyboard Conversion. More ambitious than I expected. (via)
- It’s called fdisk because…
- Computer Man [Extended Version]. Very 1980s. (via)
- The story of one latency spike. (via)
- Peering into inodes.
- After a ten-year hiatus, NetHack 3.6. (via)
- Big Data? No Thanks! Even if you don’t agree with the position, the images are neat. (via)
- Roll your own toy Unix-clone OS. (via)
- King’s Hand, which turns Go programs into utility scripts. (via)
- Why doesn’t findstr use the standard regular expression library? Another grep variant.
Your unrelated game link of the week: Freecol. Runs on all the BSDs (thanks Thomas Klausner), as far as I can tell. (via)
I had this built up well ahead of time.
- Today’s world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64. Everything else is dead, Jim. The author is/was a OpenBSD developer. (via, via)
- Show Your Support for FreeBSD. (Foundation) Donation time of year.
- As an everyday user of Linux, should I switch to BSD, why or why not?
- vCenter Web Client Plug-in for TrueNAS Now Available.
- OpenBSD Xen support. (via)
- “look I come from debian so having a stable reliable system that _also_ has software that isn’t years out of date in the repos is a shocker” (about the ports system)
- pkgsrc is moving to dash as a bootstrap shell, to replace pdksh.
- The 2015Q4 quarterly pkgsrc freeze is coming.
- BSD Magazine issue 75, with a focus on FreeBSD development tools, is available.
- DistroWatch Weekly reviews OpenBSD 5.8. (via)
- n2k15: sashan@ on PF mpsafe progess.
- n2k15: tedu@ on rebound, malloc hardening, removing legacy code.
- OPNsense 15.7.22 Released.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/12/07.
Hammer now defaults to ‘noatime’, meaning the date and time of last access are not updated on every file action. Note that creation and modification date and time are still recorded. This will help with speed and disk activity.
This may cause a problem with any software expecting this to change – mutt, possibly? We will find out. This change was done after the 4.4 branch, so it’s not in the current release of DragonFly.
If you are a WeChat user and want a DragonFly BSD shirt, send your Chinese address and mobile number to seallyhs@dragonflybsd.org, or scan this image to join the WeChat DragonFly BSD group.
This is exclusive to China right now, as it’s being done by DragonFly developer Sepherosa Ziehau – who, as you might guess by now, is based in China.
BSDNow 119 is up, with even lengthier news summaries than usual, and an interview of Paul Goyette about his testing work with NetBSD.
John Marino has created two custom make variables – .MAKE.DF.OSREL and .MAKE.DF.VERSION. (They return the current DragonFly versioning, if you can’t tell from the name.) Apparently, if you build all 22,000 or so ports together, about 15% of the total time is just awk looking up the system version, and this removes that repeated task.
Matthew Dillon has added two Hammer2 directives – ‘info’ and ‘mountall’. See his commit message for a explanation of each. This predates the 4.4 branch, so it’s available in the current release. The usual caveat applies: Hammer2 is for development only; don’t use this to store data you want to use.
I am taking this moment away from my significant backlog of things to post to note that there have been a lot of games fixes in DPorts lately. Thanks to Rimvydas, many small bugs that kept games from compiling on DragonFly are now fixed. The easiest way to see is to look at the commits from December 8th and back, but the best way is to pick one and play.
DragonFly 4.4 is released! The release page has the information, and your nearest mirror should have the images by now. To update an existing 4.2 system, see my users@ post.
Sharp-eyed users will note that release is happening with version 4.4.1, rather than the 4.4.0 you’d expect. That’s because I tagged 4.4.0, built the images, and then OpenSSL 1.0.1q was released. Rather than make everyone who installs DragonFly need to immediately update, Sascha Wildner brought in the OpenSSL update to the 4.4 branch, and I built 4.4.1 instead.