A fellow whom I’ve only seen named as Bill is working on what he calls ipfw2, though technically what’s already in DragonFly is ipfw2, since it’s the second version of ipfw. Either way, he has a project page up describing what he’s done so far, and what he plans.
Sascha Wildner has removed the old USB system from DragonFly; you’re getting USB4BSD no matter what now, after the 4.0 release. While we’re at it, xhci is now automatically loaded in the installer, so installer USB drives attached to USB3 ports will work.
Markus Pfeiffer has made usb_pf work on DragonFly, which means it’s possible to dump USB traffic and filter it, similar to tcpdump. This can be handy when debugging a USB device, and that’s like 90% of all devices anyway.
Snow snow snow!
- DoomRL, a Doom roguelike. From Hasso Tepper, who correctly pointed out I haven’t been linking enough roguelike material lately.
- Unix: Catching up with Unix errors.
- True Stuff: Build Your Own Propeller Car. Not so much about the car as about the building part.
- Making Internet Local. A deep dive into what everyone calls ‘mesh networking’ and what that really means.
- “The alternative Windows Store” I guess sounds better than win64 package manager. Anyway, the idea of a ports collection is becoming universal.
- Command-line Unix-style note taker.
- Sample the Amen Break. Hey, a Squarepusher video gets in there. (via)
- Receiving NOAA Weather Images with SDR. Sounds fun to build, though I know I won’t get to it. (via)
- What is the URL to your technical blog? More things to read there.
- New Found Sounds, early synthesizers. (also via)
- XScreenSaver 5.31. “To make this work I had to add a UTF8 parser to my VT100 implementation”
- 100-year-old mechanical computer. It does Fourier analysis. (via)
- A bread-slicing machine. Looks dangerous and useful. (via)
- Stupid Hackathon. (via)
Unrelated link of the week: Lenny Kravitz – Fly Away (lyrics) Watch to the end. “just like a dragonfly” (via)
Totally last minute.
- People still add things to telnet?
- FreeBSD has removed faith(4) and faithd(8).
- FreeBSD ports now has stack smashing protection on by default.
- FreeBSD 10.1 is out. (And PC-BSD follows)
- PC-BSd is looking at ‘roles‘.
- Printing device trees in OpenBSD.
- Munin and pf queues.
- Contributing. (Applies to any BSD, really.)
- pkgsrc-2014Q3 packages for illumos available.
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/11/10.
- from the annals of uvm, OpenBSD virtual memory.
- BSD Magazine: Hardened BSD.
- BSDFan, for Thinkpad fans on any? BSD.
- FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” is less than a month away. The author’s giving a sudo talk soon, too.
If you look at your local DragonFly mirror, you’ll see ISO and IMG versions of DragonFly 4.0.0RC3. Please run, break, and report.
(Check the iso-images directory.)
Imre Vadaz’s recent change to dev/drm, adding kqueue support, has (from anecdotal reports in IRC) made video performance much better. It’s committed to DragonFly 4.0, so it’ll be in the next release.
BSDNow 063 has the normal news articles and links, and an interview of Kristaps Džonsons, one of the people working on mandoc. There’s also a tutorial on bandwidth throttling with pf.
Matthew Dillon had some followup commits that went in just after I tagged RC2 of DragonFly 4.0 last night, so I’ve tagged RC3. Tagging’s cheap, anyway.
I just tagged a second release candidate of DragonFly 4. Matthew Dillon’s recent reapctl() addtions – now called procctl() – just went in.
For some reason, more historical links this week than usual.
- Thinking Forth. It sounds to be – though I haven’t read it yet – one of those books that transcends the target language. (via)
- Fuzix, a “new” OS. (They should just try something else small, like RetroBSD.) (via)
- The Best Small Computer in the World – 1968. (pdf, via)
- Vim after 11 years. (via)
- Terms of Service. I have other comics from the artist. (via)
- Recalculating Odds of RAID5 URE Failure.
- A brief history of spam and email crypto, from a former GMail worker.
- Kerberos Papers and Documentation (via)
- Amazon Echo, which continues the long trend of companies reinventing existing open source projects and making them creepier.
- Or making lovable things annoying. Seriously, phone alerts and “where are you?” alerts from a teddy bear? I hate it when people pepper me with that. (via)
- Noisy dead satellites. (via)
- Old UNIX releases/source
- Building a 10BASE5 “Thick Ethernet” network. I just barely remember seeing this hardware in the wild, so to speak. It was awful. (via)
- The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing (via) Lose some time on this one.
- Forth in the USSR. (PDF, via)
Unrelated link of the week: Cartozia Tales. It’s a print comic in a limited series. Many stories, many artists. I’ve been getting the issues and it’s a lot of fun. Here’s an interview with the person coordinating the whole thing.
Snow finally hit my area yesterday, which makes me happy.
- PC-BSD 10.1-RC2 Released.
- FreeBSD 10.1-RC4 now available.
- Building an OpenBSD firewall and router
- Michael W. Lucas’s next book: “Networking for Sysadmins“. BSD-friendly, of course.
- See also: his sci-fi work, not BSD related.
- PC-BSD’s Lumina gains plugins. (one link of several)
- pkgsrc-2014Q3 packages for OSX now available
- OpenBSD adds SipHash.
- OpenBSD has enabled USB3.
- The signed Book of PF made $3000 at auction.
- FreeBSD now uses vt(4) instead of syscons by default.
- Improving bcd(6)
I said “USB ethernet drivers should work now” yesterday, but didn’t specify what works with the new USB structure in DragonFly. Sascha has fixed that by explicitly porting aue(4), cue(4), ipheth(4) and kue(4) from FreeBSD. As his commit notes, there’s still a few more devices to go.
BSDNow 062 has an interview of Pawel Jakub Dawidek, and he talks about the Sun Microsystems-originated technologies found in FreeBSD. You figured that out already from the title, didn’t you?
If you’ve got a USB Ethernet device on DragonFly, it should work. Also, some cell phones tether correctly now, when they may have had trouble before.
The release candidate for DragonFly 4.0 came out last week, and normally the release would happen after a week. There’s still a few people reporting an odd freeze, so until we can find a cause, we’ll continue to wait.
Chrome runs on DragonFly now, apparently possible now because of this ported fix from Joris Giovannangeli.
Short this week because of the amount of time I was at work, but what I have is good.
- System/360, older computing pictures. (via)
- Everyone wants a ports system. EVERYONE.
- Salto, the Xerox Alto emulator. For those who saw the Alto code release last week. (via)
- Hidden Histories of the Information Age. (scroll all through for links)
- Goblins: The Fungal Body Politic. Fun if you are the right kind of nerd. (via)
- Why You Should Never Use MongoDB. Not a diatribe against MongoDB as you might expect, but an excellent, extended talk about data structure. (also via)
- I thought I had linked this already: Internet Arcade; many old games re-implemented in Javascript.
- Beginning to Observe Network Management Practices as a Third Party. (via)
Hardly any source commits to point at this week, but there’s still lots of stuff happening in BSD-land.
- MeetBSD is happening right now.
- OpenBSD 5.6 is being released right now too.
- Michael W. Lucas has released the cover to his upcoming FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials book.
- Peter N. M. Hansteen’s 3rd edition of the Book of PF is out, and he’s running an auction for the first author-signed copy – with profits to OpenBSD. This is a good strategy. I have a copy of the book and will write a review here as soon as I can finish it – only up to chapter 3 right now. The presentation that spawned the book is updated and available.
- FreeBSD 10.0 got an extension.
- Don’t run wsmoused and X at the same time in OpenBSD.
- NetBSD now has openresolv 3.6.1. It’s a resolv.conf management program I had not yet heard of.
- FreeBSD has significant changes to /dev/random,
- FreeBSD has gained TTM support in its AGP driver, and radeonkms in FreeBSD now supports AGP.
- NYCBUG, upcoming.
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/10/27.
- The Apple Mac Takes Its Place In The Post-PC World. Unix-based computers are the best game in town, it appears. (via)
- Lumina Desktop Build in FreeBSD / TrueOS. (video)