The March issue of BSD Magazine is out, and this month has an article written by Siju George about how his company is using DragonFly and Hammer for backups.
Remember: If you have a particular port that’s not building in DragonFly, there may be a patch in pkgsrc that could be brought over, as John Marino points out.
Sascha Wildner’s updated ACPICA to a very recent version, which happens to fix a bug in an earlier ACPICA version.
Here’s the announcement from Francois Tigeot: DragonFly now uses dynamic binaries in the root filesystem. You will need to do a full buildworld/buildkernel if on 3.7 and upgrading.
I am all over the map this week.
- UNIX Tutorial for Beginners. Also, UNIX Shell Scripting Tutorial. (via)
- Staticapps.org, a explanation of single-page web applications. The idea is good but the site itself is really just an ad for a service that does … single-page web application hosting. Comments on the original link source may be more useful.
- The Lazy Newb Pack for Dwarf Fortress. A good idea, but there’s actually a more recent Starter Pack. (via)
- I link to Cyriak videos from time to time; here’s a documentary about him and his work. (via scrubgenius)
- Yahoo breaks every mailing list in the world including the IETF’s. (via)
- Star Trek 1971 Text Game. Hey, I remember at least one of the variations of this! (via)
- Untrusted, a roguelike-in-appearance game where you use Javascript to get through puzzles. Warning: music. (via)
- Now even Microsoft Windows has a package manager. (via)
- Branching in code instead of in version control. I suspect this is one of those ideas that sounds good but turns out to eventually require reinventing the original setup, like NoSQL. (also via)
- “This is NOT real Git documentation!” Frighteningly real. (via)
- Heartbleed should bleed x.509 to death. (also via)
- Dudley Buck’s Forgotten Cryotron Computer. (via)
Your unrelated animated image of the week: a seal with hiccups.
Some out-of-the-ordinary things this week.
- BSDTV, a new YouTube channel. It has several videos from the recent NYCBSDCon.
- pfSense 2.1.1 is out. No, wait, it’s 2.1.2!
- Installing packages from a custom FreeBSD repository. Applies to DragonFly, too.
- DiscoverBSD’s news summary for 2014/04/07.
- A partially tongue-in-cheek suggestion for an OpenOpenSSL.
- FreeBSDNews.net is now owned by? maintained by? iXSystems, which seems to be singlehandedly building as much FreeBSD ecosystem as possible – that’s good!
- Bitrig is dropping i386 support.
- FreeBSD Journal #2 is out.
- The OpenBSD Foundation reached their goal for the year.
- The FreeBSD Foundation is kicking off their campaign.
- PC-BSD Digest 25 is out.
- Mount your NetBSD ISO directly from the file server.
- FreeBSD supports UDP-Lite, which appears to be the network protocol equivalent of turning over a bucket of ball bearings and saying “Grab what you can.”
- OpenBSD starts to bring back 4.4BSD more.
- Peter N. M. Hansteen wants to know what you do with OpenBSD in a conference-presentationish sort of way. Specifically, EuroBSDCon.
- Jordan Hubbard talks about compiler choices for FreeBSD, and points out that the processor choices these days are Intel or ARM, and that’s it.
DragonFly now has a ‘rescue’ system added in, which also functions as a way to mount encrypted filesystems. Does PAM work yet? I don’t know; I may be linking to this earlier than I need to.
I should have seen that pun coming a long time ago. BSDNow 032 is up with an interview of Dru Lavigne and the usual assortment of other recent BSD items.
Release 3.6.2 of DragonFly has been tagged, and ISO/img files are available. This includes an updated OpenSSL for Heartbleed problems. Here’s the changelog. You can, if you haven’t already, update your existing 3.6 systems the normal way.
All the dragonflybsd.org sites (www, bugs, gitweb, lists, leaf) should be available via https now, thanks to a wildcard certificate from InterNetX. Also, all the machines have an up-to-date version (1.0.1g) of OpenSSL installed to prevent the Heartbleed issue.
I’ve wanted more support for virtualized DragonFly systems. Sascha Wildner put together an experimental balloon memory driver to test out, and I ran it on two virtual machines separately, one with it loaded and one without, on the same host system. The problem is, I can’t tell what it does. The two machine reported almost the exact same RAM usage during a buildworld.
Any VMWare/virtualization experts out there able to tell me what needs to be tested to verify this?
Francois Tigeot’s rescue ramdisk work is ready for testing. You can pull it directly from his repo and try it out. It’s surprising how small the ramdisk can be crunched.
Note: he now has a newer branch than what is in that linked message.
You know what always makes me happy? When someone shows up out of the blue and says “Here; I did this cause I needed it; everyone can share.” The latest example of that is Imre Vadasz porting bwn(4), for the Broadcom BCM43xx wireless chipset over from FreeBSD to DragonFly.
Just to remind people: I’m hiring a system administrator.
This is the first Lazy Reading in a while that I hadn’t already started before the previous week’s Lazy Reading was displayed.
- Eventually, Javascript will eat everything. (via)
- Wrong and Right Reasons to be Upset about Oculus. Gets at something that’s been bothering me: too many new companies have acquisition as an exit strategy. Over time, that becomes the only strategy. (via many places)
- How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40%. I can confirm this works, via the small sample of the class I taught recently. (via I lost track, sorry)
- Toward a better programming. Makes some good points about programming, though it unfortunately ends not with solutions but with a ‘buy my stuff’ push. (via)
- Michael W. Lucas reviews “Applied Network Security Monitoring”, the book.
- 7 Habits of Highly Successful UNIX Admins.
- thread patterns, about surviving mailing list overload. You will recognize exactly what’s being described if you’ve read any mailing list for more than a year of your life. (via #dragonflybsd)
- How pinball and boardwalk amusements gave rise to video games.
- RPN calculation, a description and history.
- I don’t know if this conspiracy theory with Red Hat, systemd, and the military-industrial complex is even realistic, but it’s kinda fun to see, in a “look at that mess over there in that other operating system” kind of way. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the day: The Very Hungry Rust Monster.
Another week.
- BSDCan 2014 will have the BSD Professional Certification exam available (as beta)
- “The Design And Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System” second edition, is up for pre-order. (comments are rude/funny.)
- The DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/03/31.
- The PC-BSD Digest 24.
- reop, an follow-up from OpenBSD’s signify
- The FreeBSDNews link roundup.
- Michael W. Lucas follows up on a prank with a description of how to get a BSD convention going.
- Peter N. M. Hansteen wants feedback on his BSDCan tutorials.
- Joystick support always sounds like a good idea.
- The Playstation 2 is back as a NetBSD platform.
- Turn partitions into disk images on FreeBSD.
- You can possibly create x86 USB images with NetBSD. (you couldn’t before?)
- NetBSD imported starsign, for signing data. Since it’s an external program, I tried searching for its origin… Google failed spectacularly, with astrology links galore.
- NetBSD also added dust, which appears to be a sensible utility. (Update: both this and starsign apparently written by Alistair Crooks.)
- I didn’t know serial ports could go this fast.
- pkgsrc-2014Q1 is out.
- Pkgsrc is looking at signing packages, too.
- Some conversation about building machines with a bunch of network ports. From openbsd-misc, but probably applies across the board.
- Video of the April 1 NYCBUG presentation on random number generation is available.
In a thread about video cards on DragonFly, Francois Tigeot listed good ATI cards to try, and pointed out the VESA driver is probably your best bet right now with NVidia cards.
The acpi_thinkpad module (section? code?) has been updated. Update if you are on DragonFly 3.7, or be patient if you are on 3.6.