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)
If you can read French, or can translate, here’s an article covering the use of DragonFly as a desktop system.
BSDTalk 246 is available, and has 19 minutes of conversation about TOR, though I haven’t heard it yet to be sure.
As you may be able to guess, BSDNow episode 061 has an interview with John-Mark Gurney about updating FreeBSD’s IPSEC setup, along with the normal collection of news items. There’s also a link to a new BSD-switching blog, and “mailing list gold”.
Despite my complete lack of good planning, John Marino and Francois Tigeot have packages available for the DragonFly 4.0 release candidate that I assembled. Point at this directory to use them.
As Francois Tigeot has pointed out, recent Mesa upgrades have made very old graphics drivers using DRM1 no longer work. They’ve been removed. This won’t affect you unless your graphics card is 10+ years old.
If you are running DragonFly, and also using nginx, the so_reuseport option will give you a significant speed boost. I’ve mentioned it before, but not this directly.
Your local mirror should have a copy of the release candidate for DragonFly 4.0.0 by now. Please try it out and report problems. Note that this is a x86_64 only version; there’s no i386 version though you may be able to manually build on i386.
Lots of light topic links this week.
- A 50 Year-old Teletype Powered by a Raspberry Pi. (via)
- Found via the same link: teletype restoration.
- Also found: the rotary VoIP phone. I’ve made rotaries work again via ATA, but only for inbound. This, I would love to do.
- How SimCity came to Unix. It’s available now as Micropolis.
- Which reminds me: Magnasanti, the biggest SimCity 3000 city ever. (video)
- The Xerox Alto source code has been released. There’s a nice history at that page. (via)
- Google Summer of Code 2015 has been announced.
- The great thing about regular expression languages is that there are so many to choose from!
- Computing is women’s work, in 1967.
- An interview with Tom Limoncelli. (About LISA)
- Why Hypercard had to die. I taught a Hypercard class to older students during college; it was surprisingly easy to get people with no computer experience to build things. I miss the old “computer as tool” approach Apple had back then.
- Shall we fork Debian? (via)
- Hints for writing Unix tools. (via)
- Vimswitch.
- curl | sh. (via)
- PSA: don’t run ‘strings’ on untrusted files (via several places)
- An excellent description of the social ‘littlenets‘ concept. (via)
- Web frameworks from Wal-Mart. Not a sentence I thought I’d type.
Your unrelated animation of the week: Karateka. I remember discovering this, and laughing and laughing…
This week I was on top of the whole linking thing.
- A Minecraft plugin for FreeNAS.
- PC-BSD has a YouTube channel.
- LibreSSL 2.1.0 is out.
- OpenBSD 5.6 sneak peek.
- Question about the current state of FreeBSD
- Tanenbaum realizes BSD was a better idea. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/10/13.
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/10/20.
- FreeBSD Foundation goes to EuroBSDCon 2014.
- KDEConnect in PC-BSD.
- Behind OS X’s modern face lies an aging collection of Unix tools. (via)
- NYCBUG is looking for meeting space in 2015.
- The FreeBSD Forums are running new software.
- A 14 year old IP reference.
- NetBSD has imported openresolv 3.6.0.
- Getting snmpwalk to talk to snmpd on FreeBSD.
- PC-BSD (starts to) gain EFI support.
- Security Engineering for Linux Users. (via)
- vxlan, virtio console driver, added to FreeBSD.
- Setting a dedicated serial link on your OpenBSD system.
- Chromium has some issues in OpenBSD-current in some situations.
