Sascha Wildner has been removing the no-longer-needed bits of i386 support in DragonFly. One of the things going away is APM, the 32-bit power management superseded by acpiconf. If you still type ‘apm’ out of habit, it’s aliased so you won’t be surprised.
I had to do this early, too, so the link count is a bit low this week. Sorry!
- From the abacus to smartphone: The evolution of mobile and portable computers, a book by Evan Koblentz. (via)
- A/UX – The Long View. OS X in 1998. I wish I had been able to try this. (via)
- Monsters and Manuals, another RPG thinkblog.
- The NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament. (via)
- Linux is not gnu/linux. Linking because it’s a bit off the deep end. (via)
- Why I dislike systemd. (via)
- OBYaVLENIYA KOMANDA 135 [Command 135 initiated] Numbers stations are one of those deep-dive things. (via)
- Meet Processing, the Lingua Franca of Creative Coding. (via)
- mdast-man: Compile markdown to man pages (roff) So often, the open source solution to something is not to produce more or better quality output, but to instead rearrange the tools for doing so. (via)
I compiled this all bit early, so hopefully nothing exciting happens between now and when it gets posted.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/06/16.
- YouTube review on “Networking For Systems Administrators”. (BSD-friendly)
- Signify shortcomings.
- BSDCan 2015, a review.
- BSDNow has an already-mentioned BSDCan presentation roundup, and various OpenBSD presentations are showing on the OpenBSD papers page, and there’s a video collection page too. (via)
- Best laptop for FreeBSD or variants? (via)
- Mandoc: becoming the main BSD manual toolbox [pdf] (via)
- PkgsrcCon 2015 is definitely happening.
- We’re about halfway through the pkgsrc-2015Q2 freeze.
- OpenBSD 5.8 has been branched. (Is that the right term?)
- NetBSD has internal storage on the EdgeRouter. OpenBSD can boot there too. Is there something switch like (12+ ports) that boots a BSD? Other than Juniper? (speaking of which, I worked on an EX4300 a few days ago and liked it.)
- Temperature handling in OpenBSD has been much improved.
- FreeBSD on BeagleBone Black units now support HDMI.
Now that DragonFly can (in most cases) offer video outside of X with KMS, not just text, more console options are possible. By default, your accelerated console will scale to 80×25, but you can now tell it how many columns you want and it’ll automatically scale to fit your resolution. Or you can turn it off.
This week’s episode of BSDNow has an interview of Marc Espie of OpenBSD. There’s yet another Linux-user-going-BSD story, and a nice collection of links to presentations from the just-finished BSDCan 2015 event.
You have two options if you live on the eastern side of New York State: CDBUG is having a mandoc presentation from Ingo Schwarze on the 17th (tonight), and then Ingo is heading to NYCBUG’s meeting on the 18th (tomorrow). Note that you must RSVP and bring an ID for the NYCBUG meeting!
Thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau, powerd will now start the shutdown process if you are down to 2% battery on your DragonFly laptop. It also will delay for 60 seconds if you just booted up and are desperately searching for a power cable.
‘Historic information week’ is this week’s accidental theme.
- Why traceroute uses UDP and not ICMP.
- W. Richard Stevens, a list of works. The previous traceroute link came from there, and there’s a lot more gems in those links.
- I agree with this description of web apps.
- grepcidr2, for finding networks within a given CIDR range.
- The Architecture of Open Source Applications, a book. The Sendmail chapter may be interesting, given that Sendmail is wrapped up in the history of Unix and the Internet. Also, it notes that ‘syslog’ exists as a sendmail side project that kept going. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- What is Code? From Paul Ford. Long, but excellent. (via several places)
- Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible. (via)
- The Manuscripts of E.W. Dijkstra. This is just one of the excellent links hidden in the previous story.
- It’s the Future. The web page creation process has become complicated.(via)
- Yes, A video game contributed to Unix Development. (via)
- Finding Your Groups.
- Unix is not an acceptable Unix. The “one thing well” part of Unix tools is frequently misunderstood, perhaps on purpose. This is one of those. (via)
- Age, Pleasing Apple, and Trying To Climb Out of the Hole. Getting old, running your own business, and programming, is all together a daunting prospect.
- The Apple Collector. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Fully Computerized.
I’ve uploaded DragonFly 4.0.6 ISO and .img files. (Does that capitalization make sense?) They should be available at your nearest mirror, or will be shortly. I am still working on the 4.2 release candidate images.
News is a bit light this week, probably because BSDCan was eating up people’s attention. I am assuming video will be up soon; I want to see the keynote.
- Tarsnap GUI for the desktop. (via)
- The pkgsrc-2015Q2 freeze is starting tomorrow.
- USB thermometer support, OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
- Intel is building BSD-specific utilities, if I read this right.
- BSDCon Brasil has expanded their convention and have room to present more papers.
- Putting FreeBSD 11 onto a Raspberry Pi 2.
- Blobs blobs blobbity people care about concept more than reality.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/06/08.
- FreeNAS in production.
- Test the new OpenBSD audio(4) driver.
- xhyve, a port of FreeBSD bhyve to Mac OS X.
- autonet, a simple wifi network chooser for OpenBSD.
- Signify: Securing OpenBSD from Us to You. (via)
The more eagle-eyed may have noticed a branching for DragonFly 4.2, and for DragonFly 4.0.6. The 4.2 branch is currently only a release candidate, so don’t necessarily change over yet – it’s for testing, not release. Note that packages for 4.2 are not yet built, so you’ll have to manually specify a package path to install with pkg on 4.2 – for now.. That won’t be the case for the actual release, of course. DragonFly 4.3 users will have to specify PKG_PATH manually to use 4.2 images until new ones are built. 4.2 release candidate users will be fine. (see comments for correction.)
The 4.0.6 release is mostly to get the recent OpenSSL update into a 4.0.x build.
I am working on image building for both.
This week’s BSDNow has a talk with DragonFly’s very own Sepherosa Ziehau, about the huge amount of work he’s done on the network stack.
Matthew Dillon’s already using a 4K monitor on DragonFly, and he’s written notes on the various performance tweaks that went with it.
The direct memory access reservation on DragonFly has been set to 128M. It used to be 16, but anyone using a system for more than a text console would want the greater memory reservation. It can be set back to 16M, which is useful probably if you are one of those text console users, or if you have a strangely underpowered video card.
Even sysctl accesses can be made to handle multiprocessor environments. This can actually make a difference when you’ve got a lot of processors building a lot of software, as in all of dports.
From IRC today:
“19:43 <@dillon> I’m bored at the moment. lemme try to speed up module builds“
Buildkernel, depending on your processor count, now may have tripled in speed.
This week is more eclectic than usual.
- How to boost your Vim productivity. As usual, the comments on the link location are nearly more useful than the target story. (via)
- Telegrams: still possible, even desirable, and legally binding. (via)
- An in-depth explanation of host names from Matthias Rampke on the DragonFly users@ list.
- PreTTY Screenshots. (via)
- The ultimate guide to analog control panels in sci-fi movies. (via)
- My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part Three
- “TIS-100, a game about rewriting corrupted code to fix a fictional ’80s computer.“
- On Tricks, Empty Rooms, and Basic Trap Design. (via)
- Goblinpunch, an endless supply of D&D-ish RPG ideas. (also via)
- VoIP honeypot results.
- The Underhanded C Contest winners. (via)
Your unrelated video link of the week: Stairway to Stardom. 1980s public access TV performances. Highlights one, two, and three. (via private list.)
A more compact week.
- usesthis.com has a BSD category. (via)
- Another BSD technology comes to Windows.
- BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code. 15 year old article. (via)
- Next CDBUG meeting is June 17th.
- BSD Magazine for May.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/06/01.
- FreeBSD 8.4 is reaching end-of-life.
- “The launchd on FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD train is never coming“. (via)
- There seems to be some sort of merging between PC-BSD and FreeNAS build scripts – or something more complex is happening?
- FreeNAS 10 Hackathon.
- My FreeNAS Lab.
- Putting OpenBSD in the cloud.
- Replacements for OpenBSD 5.7 disc 2 have been shipped.
- There’s two new LibreSSL mailing lists.
- Yay, cross-pollination!
- OpenBSD now supports RTL8188CE wifi cards via rtwn(4).
- Duovero Gumstix boards are (or will be?) supported on FreeBSD.
- SRIOV support for Intel 10G cards on FreeBSD.
Those changes I mentioned yesterday for text console support? They’re in DragonFly-master now, along with a loader tunable to turn it on and off.