Justin Sherrill – Page 155 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/09/212014/09/21

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/21

Lots of links this week.

Device names. (via)
xscreensaver 5.30 is out, along with a story of how much work jwz put into the first version of Lament.
One Thing Well mentions toybox, which I think is similar to busybox, but BSD-licensed.
This hard drive still worked. (via)
Unix: Scripting with templates.
Road to Rust 1.0 (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Intel Edison. Processors have become a sort of monoculture in the last 5-10 years; it’s good to see variety coming back at the small scale. (via sjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Bézier Clock (via I forget, sorry)
Bézier Method. (via)
wasavi, vi in most any web browser text area.
How to become a GOOD theoretical physicist by Gerard ‘t Hooft. (via)
Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile. (via)
HPN-SSH – high performance SSH, as anyone who has scp’d a large file would want. (via)
Lost Lessons from 8-Big BASIC. BASIC programming was very … immediate.(also via)
Booting directly into Vim. (via)
Memory Management Reference. (via)
ENIACinaction.com, about the first modern computer, in the 1940s. (via SIGCIS)
The Ig Nobel prizes for 2014 are announced.
XScreenSaver on YouTube.
World’s longest traceroutes.

2014/09/202014/09/20

In Other BSDs for 2014/09/20

Low on the source links this week, but there’s plenty else.

TrueOS, CD-sized. Warning: lots of ads on that page. (via)
FreeBSD with a swap file instead of a swap partition. (via)
FreeNAS in VMWare Workstation, part 1. Lots of screenshots, little explanation. (via)
FreeBSD 10.1 Beta 1 is available.
A summary of the OpenBSD GSoC systemd compatibility program.
DiscoverBSD news summary for 2014/09/15.
Minix 3.3, with NetBSD userland and pkgsrc.
pkgsrc is now frozen in preparation for pkgsrc-2014Q3.
A pkgsrc pbulk cwrappers test.
PC-BSD gains pc-sysconfig, a system configuration utility.
Lumina supports OpenBSD now too.
FreeBSD has upgraded to OpenPAM “Ourouparia”.
OpenBSD has dropped sendmail.
openbsd-misc@ had discussion about low-power servers, with the APU mentioned often. (see below for update)
From this thread, this javascript program will get you web video instead of Flash on many sites.
From talk@nycbug, some cheap BSD laptop ideas. (look for “Cheap Laptops…” thread)

Update: from talk@nycbug, George Rosamond gives a nice APU setup summary.

2014/09/19

DragonFly as a desktop

There’s been so much work in DragonFly recently that makes a desktop easier (i915 support, dports, and so on), that I decided to resurrect an older Dell machine and use it as my desktop.

The Dell that I’m using is a leftover from someone else’s workplace; it’s 7 years old, and has “only” 4G of RAM and a Core 2 DuoE6600 CPU in it. It works, however.

Setting up DragonFly and installing xorg and so on is pretty straightforward. Using dports makes it crazy quick to add all the packages. I went for XFCE4 because I could. Starting X gave me some trouble at first; the default config couldn’t find the mouse and would eventually crash.

Running ‘X -configure’ created a xorg.conf file I could edit, and these lines in /etc/rc.conf gave me a working mouse:

moused_enable="YES"
moused_type="auto"
moused_port="/dev/ums0"

The crashing problem with my radeon-driven video card was fixed by turning off the acceleration – uncommenting this line in xorg.conf did it:

Option     "NoAccel"

Video performance isn’t as nice as I would like it with acceleration, but this is an older machine anyway.

I couldn’t get sound working. Francois Tigeot has a branch of DragonFly that contains newer sound drivers brought over from FreeBSD, here:

git://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~ftigeot/dragonfly.git (pcm_2014_september branch.)

It doesn’t support device cloning, so I can run Youtube videos and XMMS, but not audio from both at the same time. (for instance; not that you’d want to do this other than by accident)

I installed x11/webfonts, and web pages look a bit better after changing my default font preferences.

And… that’s about it. It’s a working desktop. Digging up a half-height video card that has working acceleration is a next step, but I can’t imagine that’ll be expensive. I wish I had done this a long time ago.

2014/09/18

BSDNow 055: The Promised WLAN

BSDNow 055 has the normal news items, and an interview with Adrian Chadd, who has dome a lot of work on FreeBSD network device drivers (and some coordination with DragonFly, too, thank you Adrian), plus a lengthy news roundup.

2014/09/15

Backlight on a laptop

Markus Pfeiffer has made it possible to control your laptop’s backlight using ACPI – if you have a i915 chipset and DragonFly. xbacklight does not work, but setting hw.acpi.video.lcd0.brightness does.

2014/09/152014/09/14

Certificate opinions

I need to get a legit certificate for this domain. I’ve never done serious https cert shopping – who has, and what’s your opinion of the vendors? (“Not Network Solutions” I can already guess).

2014/09/142014/09/14

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/14

I didn’t even notice, because this has been a difficult week for me, but I’ve hit over 6,000 posts on the Digest. I passed the 11-year mark too, a few weeks ago.

Wee Ada Lovelace. From a wee series, though this is the only computer-related one.
Being Productive with Emacs, part 1. (via)
The guy who didn’t invent email but really wants everyone to think so. (via)
Git Pretty. It’s a chart! (via)
How is a binary executable organized? Let’s explore it! Linux binaries, but mostly still applies. (via)
The network nightmare that ate my week. (via)
In a weird coincidence, the person who wrote that last link, Garrett Wollman, used to be a FreeBSD core team member and also knows a former coworker of mine, Scott Fybush. No point, just a strange connection when a faceless web page on the Internet resolves into someone you know indirectly through other channels.
Modernizing “less”. I’d be happier if it improved function, and was sent upstream. (via)
Breaking Madden: Jadeveon Clowney’s quest for 201 sacks in a game. I’ve posted links to prior gamebreaking attempts by this author before. I like how he’s doing his best to subvert the digital world presented by the game.
The Semantics of Software. “There are many parts to a praise-worthy open source project”. Read that section especially. (via)
The math is a bit beyond me, but I’d like to model the wifi signal in my home this way. (via)
“I want a sensible phone, not a smart phone“. This is why I’m still using a 4-year-old HTC Incredible – though it’s showing its age. (via)
Sweat the small stuff. I like the attention to detail, and the animated examples of what he’s doing with his software. (via)

Your unrelated video of the week: Tea Making Tips, from England in 1941. This 60-year-old WW2-era film is actually one of the better how-to-deal-with-tea guides I’ve ever seen. (via)

2014/09/132014/09/12

In Other Linuxes for 2014/09/13

I’m doing this little extra feature because I ran into several news items over the past week or so that made me say “what the hell?” out loud to my monitor.

Fedora To Get a New Partition Manager. All? Almost all? Linux distributions use gparted, which is open source and can be updated. Why not add to that? Also, it’s yet another preannouncement about how this new replacement tool will work – it’s not functional yet.

Text streams should be the fallback interface in Unix. Every 2 or 3 years someone gets this idea in some form – somehow it doesn’t overcome 40+ years of text usage.

Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems. Nobody can find fault with ideas like easier package management and signing. (Though maybe having the same upgrade mechanism for base + 3rd party software isn’t a good idea) However. this answer, coming from part of the group behind systemd, ties all software installation into having a btrfs volume – even requiring a virtual btrfs volume if there isn’t one installed. Incompatible software versions are dealt with by turning /usr into a sort of container. That kills any sort of need to interoperate with other software. And of course it assumes there is no Unix but Linux. (via)

Grump grump grump.

2014/09/132014/09/12

In Other BSDs for 2014/09/13

This has been a very hectic week for me, but I still have links for you.

The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System book is getting a significant update.
Install Snort on FreeBSD. That place isn’t too far from me. (via)
uGet, Open Source Lightweight Download Manager, is Now Available for BSD.
loksh, a Linux port of OpenBSD’s ksh.
2Q buffer cache in OpenBSD.
DiscoverBSD’s news summary for 2014/09/08.
PC-BSD’s 10.0.3 quarterly package update is out.
People are noticing the OpenBSD GSoC systemd replacement project.
“GCC is by far the weirdest compiler I’ve ever used.“
FreeBSD now supports the Dream Cheeky Webmail Notifier.
FreeBSD has a ARM-based FPGA core programming tool. Not sure if that’s the right phrase.
FreeBSD’s bootloader can now talk to the pcibios.
Also, the UEFI bootloader can now talk serial/null console.
Thanks for the BSD help, Microsoft!?
procfs is gone from OpenBSD.
Low power server discussion, in a home context.
Building pkgsrc using cwrappers and pbulk.
How to get Bitrig on ARM.

2014/09/112014/09/11

Lumina for DragonFly

In a bit of perfect timing, PC-BSD’s desktop environment, Lumina, has been ported to DragonFly, thanks to mneumann! It’s not in dports yet, but it should be buildable from source…

2014/09/11

BSDNow 054: Luminary Environment

BSDNow 054 has an interview with Ken Moore of PC-BSD about the just-released-as-a-port Lumina desktop environment, along with a slew of news items and a Lumina walkthrough.

2014/09/102014/09/10

A domain name change

The Digest is now located at dragonflydigest.com (or dragonflybsddigest.com if you are really into typing). Everything else should be generally the same, and old links still work. I’m only 8 or 9 years late in getting a real domain name attached…

2014/09/08

systat gains -altq display

You can now see the packets, bytes, and drops in altq by using the -altq arg to systat, thanks to this recent commit from Matthew Dillon.

2014/09/072014/09/05

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/07

I finished almost this entire thing just on September 1st. I blame school season restarting. Speaking of which, O’Reilly’s running a 50% off ebooks sale.

VAXen, My Children, Just Don’t Belong In Some Places. (via)
Taking it to Th’emacs. (via)
Running old UNIXes on the Raspberry Pi. (via)
In the Mind of the Fractal King. A reconstructed Benoit Mandelbrot interview. Does each question match the structure of the overall text? (via)
How I Start: Go. (via)
How to Secure SSH with Google Authenticator’s Two-Factor Authentication. Can you do this on BSD? I hope so. (via)
A 4-minute film about IBM culture – mostly before computing as we’d know it, from a longer 2011 film. (via SIGCIS)
Unix: Better network connection insights with mtr.
It’s a trap! Employment documents that require you to violate company policy. I had a similar situation once, handling abuse@ email for a Time Warner affiliate. I have some horrifying stories from that…
The truth about 2 spaces after the end of a sentence. (via)
Classic Papers in Programming Languages and Logic. Set aside some time for this. (via)
Building my own home router, part 1. I can figure out the other hardware – I just need a low-cost 24-port gigabit ethernet card so I can build a home switch. Yeah, yeah, I know. (via)
thx nsa.
The things that will last on the internet are not owned. (via)
Why do you think tech books don’t sell like they used to? (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: the final answer on how to say GIF . (video source – watch the outtakes, too.)

2014/09/062014/09/05

In Other BSDs for 2014/09/06

Why is it so warm out? I want autumn to start.

BSD compared to Linux, an explanation.
A description of what rcctl does. (via several places)
NetBSD runs on the OpenRISK 1000.
tmux-resurrect, making tmux survive machine restarts.
OpenBSD version numbering explained.
PC-BSD has its own subreddit.
Lumina is now available as a port – will it work on DragonFly? Someone try!
DiscoverBSD news for 2014/09/01.
NetBSD 5 systems now use modular xorg.
The 2014Q3 pkgsrc freeze is coming up.
PXE installs of OpenBSD with Serva.
Are you a “connoisseur of old time stamps“?
FreeBSD has some support for the Altera SOCFPGA.
Your cross-pollination moment of the week.
Yes, it runs (Retro)BSD.

2014/09/05

UDP improvements for DragonFly

This very long commit message from Sepherosa Ziehau details the UDP changes he’s made. It’s mostly technical details, but at the end he mentions this little tidbit:

“For ‘kq_connect_client -u’ test, this commit gives 400% performance improvement (31Kconns/s -> 160Kconns/s).”

2014/09/04

DragonFly pf/altq/fairq users tip

If you are on DragonFly, using pf, using altq, and using fairq to control usage, there’s a latency bug that Matthew Dillon recently fixed. He’s posted an announcement and committed fixes to master and 3.8, so it’s only an upgrade away.

2014/09/04

BSDNow 053: It’s HAMMER Time

Not the first time that pun has been deployed, of course, but: BSDNow 053 has a Hammer tutorial, along with an interview of Reyk Floeter about OpenBSD’s httpd, along with the usual recent news and some links to some things I haven’t seen, like pfSense tricks.

2014/09/03

Haswell graphics and port support

Thanks to Francois Tigeot, the drm/i915 driver now supports Haswell processors, and the special FDI and DDI ports they use. I am late posting this.

2014/09/03

An easier moused start

You can now start moused with an argument, so it will look at the right device. In most cases, I imagine “/etc/rc.d/moused start ums0” will be what anyone wants. Credit to Michael Neumann for the update. Perhaps moused_flags="ums0" will do it too? I haven’t tried yet.

This will overwrite your /etc/devd.conf.