BSDNow has reached the milestone of 50 episodes, and this week’s show has VPN setup as a tutorial, Robert Watson interviewed, and of course more discussion on most every flavor.
There’s been good progress in Francois Tigeot’s work on Haswell graphics support in DragonFly. If you have one of those newer units, you should be able to use the i915 driver with it now – as long as you keep acceleration off. (You won’t notice any difference in 2D anyway.)
This week’s Lazy Reading started as overflow from last week.
- Cron checker. Cron commands to English. (via)
- Unboxing the Magnus supercomputer. Aw, Crays don’t look as cool as they used to. (via)
- OpenVMS gets a new lease on life. (via) Also, there are public OpenVMS installations like deathrow (via) and pub1 (via).
- Unix: Controlling privileged access.
- Unix: Top networking commands and what they tell you.
- runit instead of systemd, on Void Linux. A ray of hope. (via)
- The future of iced coffee. Why can’t someone put the same treatment into tea? (via)
- What ORMS have taught me: just learn SQL. (via)
- Docker security with SELinux. Containerization, which is all the rage these days, does not enforce the same security wall as with a virtual machine – containers can ‘leak’ to their parent operating system. I’m not sure enough people realize this. (via)
- A very tiny, monospace, bitmap font. Check the screenshot of it being used on a 320×200 screen. (via)
- lowRISC. Open source System on a Chip.
- The Worst API Ever Made. I can’t judge if that’s really so, but it’s always fun to watch trainwrecks. (via)
- My history with Forth & stack machines. Forth is a crazy language, in a good way. (via)
- Lawless Legends, an Apple][ FRPG – in development. (via)
- A Mac IIci
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Quantum & Pixel. Another Boulet comic, this time exploring 2D physics.
A relatively short week; I’m on the move today.
- DiscoverBSD’s roundup for 2014/08/04.
- FreeBSD installed. Your next 5 moves should be… (via)
- switched from arch linux to openbsd, reference advice?
- “make the Linux network stack as good as FreeBSD’s“. I’m leery of that statement. This comment may lead to more useful data.
- FreeBSD ZFS snapshots with zfstools.
- An old Macintosh IIci 25Mhz running Apache under NetBSD. Link was down when I checked it… probably from everyone else hitting it. (via)
- MeetBSD 2014 is happening November 1-2 in San Jose, California. (via)
- *NIX programming survey. (via)
I’ve tagged DragonFly 3.8.2, which exists mostly to accommodate the latest release of OpenSSL. (Security fixes, which should not be a surprise.) I will build images as soon as I get a chance.
If you have a i915 video chipset (which appears to be most every recent laptop), Francois Tigeot would like you to try his huge patch. It doesn’t support Haswell chips yet, though it lays some of the groundwork for it.
BSDNow 049 is titled “The PC-BSD Tour”, and gives exactly that during the show. They also talk about some recent news items that I missed, and point at some interesting things, like some recent BAFUG videos that made it online.
If you have a particular favorite thing in DragonFly, Damian Vincino would like to know about it.
There’s a new version of pkg out – 1.3. (via) That’s an announcement on the FreeBSD-ports-announce list. Since DragonFly also uses pkg, that means it’s available for DragonFly too. John Marino reported on IRC that he’s testing a bulk build now, using it on DragonFly.
NYCBUG is holding a OpenBSD Ports ‘class’ on August 6th (day after tomorrow). You can make a port of something you need, or work on something existing, hackathon style. See the announcement for details – you need to warn someone you are coming for building access.
There’s a lot to read this week… I’m not sure how that happened.
- Schwa, two decades later. I had this, then.
- Famous Women of Computer Science. At least some of the names should be familiar to you. (via)
- Anil Dash on the shifting meaning of “public”. An outgrowth of the jerktech problem.(via)
- The History of Autocorrect. (via a newsletter)
- -2000 lines of code. An early Macintosh story. (via)
- Bill Atkinson’s name in the previous link made me think of Burger Bill (Rebecca, now) Heineman, which led to this: Mentions of Wolf3D for the Apple ][gs. It’s findable, even.
- And that Sheppyware link reminds me of Sweet16, a really nice ][gs emulator for the Mac. Excuse me as I wander down the halls of memory…
- Cool-old-term. Requires qt5 and I don’t know if it works on BSD… but it’s neat looking. (via)
- Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim. There’s some more good resources in the source for this link.
- At the same site: SSH Hacks.
- hicat, cat with syntax highlighting. (via)
- I’ve mentioned ISO 3103 before, or at least I thought I did, but there are apparently 25 more tea-related standards.
- That led me to find George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, and Douglas Adams all had Opinions on Tea. I must have linked to one of them before, but I can’t find it. Douglas Adams is correct, though: most people in the U.S. have never had a decent cup of tea. (via)
- Origins of common UI symbols. (via)
- Movie Film, at Death’s Door, Gets a Reprieve. This interests me because it’s in the town where I live, but there’s something else. The vast, vast quantities of film out there was filmed in the last 100 years or so. Most of that film is still readable, though the older nitrate films are fragile. If all that video was digital, how would we access it? I don’t have a single digital storage item in my house older than 10 years, except maybe a Zip disk or two, and there’s no way I can read them. (via)
- How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors. I expected the article to quote itself in the middle or something similar; Internet jokes are warping my expectations. (via)
- Software, it’s a thing. Talking about how software exists when it is used, not just as a saved file but rather as a multitude of activities – and how that relates to preserving that history. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Mmmm… diagrams. That describes me. The subject and artist, Scott McCloud, has a book called Understanding Comics that is an excellent discussion of perception and communication. His exploration of visual “closure” is good for anyone who has to think about interfaces.
I was thinking this was going to be a short week, but nope.
- Using pkgsrc for HPC. Follow the thread for discussion of pkgsrc as a self-contained tool system, including the compiler.
- Debugging Firefox on pkgsrc.
- CDE is in pkgsrc-wip.
- tmux in NetBSD got updated.
- pcc in NetBSD got an update, too.
- NetBSD can work on a Kobo Touch?
- FreeBSD’s 40G XL710 driver reached version 1.0.
- FreeBSD has “pkgfs, a file system implementation for reading files out of a compressed tarball, aka package.” From Juniper.
- FreeBSD has Chromebook2 support.
- The FreeBSD Foundation semiannual newsletter is out.
- The FreeBSD quarterly report is out.
- a survey of FreeBSD ZFS snapshot automation tools
- Keeping pf.conf in sync. Many different suggestions.
- OpenBSD’s homegrown httpd is gaining fastcgi.
- Ted Unangst has summarized links to all the g2k14 hackathon reports.
- PC-BSD has something called syscache, which I’m seeing commits for but I haven’t found what it is exactly – a caching system for package info, I think?
- DIscoverBSD for 2014/07/28.
- BSDSec, a BSD-specific security site. (via)
- List of VPSs that support BSD. (via)
As you can probably guess somewhat from the title, BSDNow 048 has an interview about LibreSSL, with Brent Cook. There’s also the normal news roundup, and other recent events.
A frequent question people ask when trying Hammer is “How can I do software RAID to cover a disk failure?” Hammer provides for streaming one volume to another, so you can duplicate drives, but there isn’t an automatic failover mechanism as there is with a RAID setup. The first answer is usually “get hardware RAID“; my preferred solution. The remaining software solutions are vinum, ccd, and lvm for DragonFly.
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out, and it contains several articles about pkg, for use on FreeBSD, PC-BSD, and DragonFly. The article on DragonFly and pkg was written by Siju George.
Rust has been ported to DragonFly by Michael Neumann. His blog has implementation details, and you can pull from his repo to get a buildable version. This may be useful, as he notes, for anyone wanting to build Rust on other BSDs.
I missed this last week because I was on the road: BSDNow 047 is up, titled DES Challenge IV, has some followup on recent topics like pf in FreeBSD and the recent OpenBSD hackathon, plus an interview of Dag-Erling Smørgrav.
It’s all multimedia day here, as BSDTalk 243 is also out with 16 minutes of conversation with Ingo Schwarze about mandoc. Mandoc is the man replacement in OpenBSD and built-but-not-yet-used in DragonFly. ‘man replacement’ is probably an oversimplification.
I was low on time but I still brought the links!
- This is why software sucks. Many people get tech news by skimming headlines, and don’t read details – so prominently writing an opinionated title is more effective sometimes than, say, reasoned argument.
- “selective disclosure” is a better term. (same author)
- The EFF’s Open Wireless Router project. Can they get a 48-port one built?
- UNIX: knowing your memory commands.
- The Open Source Identity Crisis. I agree with the article – some people still think open source developers are the coders, and then there’s everyone else… which is emphatically not the case any more. (via)
- Used/refurbished server sellers. This is going to be useful to someone.
- Programming with Punched Cards. (PDF, via)
- Escher: Choiceless programming. Weird. (via)
- Apparently I’ll link to anything about Dwarf Fortress; it’s a culturally distinct thing – so much so that it’s being used as an art exhibit. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Summer cakes. The second recipe is from Nicola Humble. I just read her surprisingly interesting history of the cookbook in the UK, hence the link. Plus, I’m hungry.
Part of this was done while traveling, but still a decent week for links.
- A BSD-licensed timeout(1).
- DiscoverBSD roundup for 2014/07/21.
- NetBSD has a start of a radeon driver.
- FreeBSD has a Phabricator site, which is getting linked in some commits.
- The OpenBSD cvsweb was down but appears to be back now.
- Lua in NetBSD went from version 5.1 to 5.3.
- Yay cross-pollination, sorta?
- “*BSD on the desktop for an intermediate Linux user?“
- NetBSD got a slight binary loading speedup.
- OpenBSD + OSX/iOS and IPsec/l2tp setup, the thread and the followup.
- Trying to establish the longest trust chain possible for an OpenBSD install.
- OpenBSD’s new httpd is now installed by default. Lynx is no longer. (partially via)
- ldapd/OpenBSD users may need this thread when upgrading.
- DIAGNOSTIC does not slow down NetBSD.
- Bitrig is nearing 1.0, according to an email on their tech@bitrig.org list. But I can’t find a way to link to the summary of what they have done. There’s the Bitrig roadmap, I guess?
- An early draft (“prerelease”) of Michael Lucas’s next book, “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials“, is available.
- Undeadly has a lot of articles written by recent OpenBSD Hackathon participants. Instead of linking to specific ones, I’ll just point you at the site. (undeadly.org can’t tag or search to a summary page.)
- BSD, the movie. (via).
