This week’s full-length BSDNow episode has an interview of Brian Callahan (NYCBUG) and Aaron Bieber (COBUG) about BSD user groups, along with a number of other topics.
We’re due for the next release of DragonFly. I’ve posted the two-week warning to kernel@. As I noted in that post, please look at the list of issues for the release and see what you can close.
Francois Tigeot is giving a talk tomorrow on benchmarking DragonFly using PostgreSQL, at PGCon 2014. PGCon is the PostgreSQL convention happening immediately after BSDCan in the same location, in case you didn’t know already.
Imre Vadasz is our newest DragonFly committer. Welcome, Imre!
If ever there was a golden moment, this would be it: with the news that networking hardware from the US is suspect, as is China’s, the best networking setup seems to be one you can look at yourself. Someone get those OpenCompute Networking machines going! More port density! Running BSD!
(Suggestions on how I can get a system with 24+ 1G ports are welcome; I need that at work immediately.)
Another week, another linkpile. I’d probably have more links if it wasn’t for Lost Alpha coming out.
- Novena in the X-Ray. I like being able to see the ferrite cores inside the Ethernet ports.
- Hardening Android. It’s a good idea. (via)
- How to run the previous command with sudo quickly. Linked more because I never remember CTRL-a as the nondestructive alternative to CTRL-u.
- UNIX on the Game Boy Advance. 5th Edition UNIX, too. There’s some good history included. (via)
- Have you changed your password lately?
- What happened to/with BIND 10? Some good points in that presentation. (via)
- One of the better casemods I’ve ever seen.
- Wearable NFC. Slightly less invasive version of RFID or magnet implantation. (via)
- SIGGRAPH 2014 Technical Papers Preview Trailer. The trailer has some neat stuff in it, and here’s the actual papers. (via)
- LibreSSL status report. Notable: a commercial company supports OpenSSL, but the code quality was horrible. Commercial sponsors don’t necessarily make everything better. Michael Lucas has notes too, and there’s video. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Dragonfly (the bug) closeups.
Some leftovers from last week since I’m catching up, so get ready to read.
- What’s wrong with systemd. Matches some of my thoughts – Linux is transitioning from being against the monolith of Microsoft, to assuming a dominant place. (via)
- DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/05/12.
- PC-BSD Digest 28 has images of the new AppCafe.
- PC-BSD Digest 29 summarizes how PBIs are changing (for the better).
- NanoBSD and Raspberry Pi. (via)
- UNIX: Automating your server inventory (Mostly can apply to BSD systems)
- BSD Magazine for April: Free Pascal and other topics.
- LibreSSL will be portable. I still want a portable pf.
- FreeBSD 8.3 is EOL.
- Epoch, an init replacement to avoid systemd, may work on OpenBSD.
- DMARC is causing some changes for FreeBSD mailing lists. (hey, this will affect DragonFly, too, maybe.)
- The pkgsrc-wip@ mailing lists are now switched to tech-pkg@ for NetBSD.
- OpenBSD now stack-shuffles.
- FreeBSD has added the mrsas(4) driver. (Why doesn’t it show up in a man page search at the site?)
- Sometimes, Google DTRT.
- FreeBSD has added the LM75 i2c temp sensor driver.
- JabirOS 2.0, a fork from FreeBSD 10.
- Michael W. Lucas has some notes from the pre-BSDCan FreeBSD Devsummit.
- If you dig into the BSDCan schedule, some of the presentation have slides linked. Undeadly has linked to a number of them directly.
Portmaster, if you install it, tells you to upgrade your packages. If you are on DragonFly, you are already upgraded.
Episode 037 of BSDNow is coming from the going-on-right-now BSDCan. It’s mostly an interview with Matthew Ahrens.
Sepherosa Ziehau has enabled GSI target CPU auto selection, by default, on x86_64. He says to let him know if there’s problems. I’m not sure what form the problems would take, cause I’m not sure what this does.
I missed this last week: BSDNow episode 36 is out with an interview of David Chisnall of FreeBSD, plus a RAID tutorial, and other stuff as always.
Matthew Dillon brought in Adrian Chadd’s sleep state changes for the ath(4) driver from FreeBSD to DragonFly; you may see reduced power usage if you have the appropriate hardware.
libpcap has been updated in DragonFly by Matthew Dillon, and file has been updated by Peter Avalos.
I’ve linked to Wizzywig (free complete book PDF at that link before, as a sort of early semi-fictional history of personal computing. I met the author at TCAF this weekend; his Brain Rot comics about the start of hip-hop are enjoyable too. There’s about a zillion more books I wanted to buy at TCAF, too…
- Arabic programming language artwork. “At every single step of the way, every software tool you would use to build a language breaks horribly when encountering non-Latin text.” (via)
- How babies are like Unix.
- Bringing up V6 Unix on the Ersatz-11 PDP-11 Emulator. (via)
- How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch. From the man himself. (via)
- The Largest Vocabulary in Hip-Hop. Diving into language use and data analysis. (via)
- The Quest for Randomness. (via)
- Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. An AD&D module and map, illustrated and turned into a complete narrative. (via)
- Recreational Mathematics Magazine. Someone will find this deeply satisfying. (via)
- Practical Alternatives to systemd?
- The operating system: should there be one? (PDF) Smalltalk, lurking. (via)
- Found via that previous link: The Interlisp Programming Environment. (PDF) Notice it says ‘environment’, not ‘language’. Lisp implementations seem to be considered both the operating system and the programming language.
- Again found via: Go is more UNIX than UNIX.
Your unrelated link of the week: Memorex. As a friend from years ago said, “Eiiiiiiiiighteeeeeees”. (via)
Short week, cause I’m on the road…
- The NetBSD Foundation 2013 Financial Report. (via)
- PC-BSD Digest 27 – they’re mushing pkg and PBI management together.
- Decent VPS providers with BSD images. There’s more out there than I realized.
- FreeBSD Foundation newcons highlight.
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/05/05.
I’ve seen Atlassian Confluence, a Java-based wiki program, in a few places. Atlassian apparently offers their software at a discount (free?) to qualified open source projects. I set up Confluence 5.4 on DragonFly as a test run, and it generally worked. That’s great! I tried to set up version 5.5, and it will not start.
May 08, 2014 7:24:41 PM org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase startInternal
SEVERE: A child container failed during start
java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: java.lang.InternalError: platform not recognized
at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.report(FutureTask.java:122)
This is annoying. DragonFly (or any BSD) is not supported by Atlassian for Confluence, so it’s not a surprise… but I was so close! Their product has a very nice interface and I was planning to replace Mediawiki at my workplace with it, for some internal documentation. This FreeBSD bug report is the closest fix I can find, but it’s old enough it shouldn’t matter now.
It’s Day Against DRM, and O’Reilly and No Starch Press are having significant sales on – of course – DRM-free ebooks. That represents a good slice of the BSD-centric books out there.
NYCBUG has a presentation from John Baldwin, happening on the 7th (tomorrow!), all about Bhyve, the BSD hypervisor.
Wojciech Puchar noted with some surprise that DragonFly uses less CPU than expected for high-packet-rate traffic. This has been going on for a while, and apparently Sepherosa Ziehau has even more improvements planned.