The bnx(4) and bge(4) network drivers now have APE support, thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau. What’s that mean? Other than an opportunity for punning jokes, I don’t know.
If you have a DragonFly 3.4 system that has already been switched over to dports, and you upgrade it to DragonFly 3.6, you might see an odd problem. Rebuild pkg, and it will work.
I’ve only seen a few reports, so I don’t know if this is even likely to happen to most upgraders.
ISA device support is really gone. Well, except for keyboard and some spots where it can’t be be removed. I don’t think I’ve even seen an ISA card in some years…
John Marino has moved DragonFly from binutils 2.22 to 2.24. I think this may require a full buildworld when upgrading… not sure. Anyway, binutils has a changelog if you are curious.
BSDNow episode 14 is up – and actually has been for a few days; I’ve been on the road. There’s an interview with George Wilson about OpenZFS and a bunch more stuff I haven’t had a chance to watch yet. (see previous note about being on the road.)
I had a sometimes-great, sometimes-difficult trip to New York City over the past few days, and while I was there, I met the ball of energy that is George Rosamond of NYCBUG (which is having a huge party right now.) He and I talked for a bit about various aspects of the BSD ecosystem, and one thing he noted was that people aren’t generally aware of all the licenses in use for the different software packages on the system, or even the individual licenses in the system files.
There is an ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES setting in pkgsrc, where software licensed under terms not in that list won’t install. That’s useful, but frustrating, because it keeps people from getting what they asked for – a software install. Something that would be useful – and it could be cross-BSD very easily – would be a license audit summary.
There’s meta-data on every package in FreeBSD’s ports and DragonFly’s dports and pkgsrc and OpenBSD’s port system. Why not say ‘pkg licenses’ in the same way you can say ‘pkg info’, and get a summary of the licenses you have installed in the system? (or pkg_licenses, etc. You get the idea) This wouldn’t prevent people from installing software, but it would give a very quick view of what you were using.
> pkg licenses
Software package License
---------------- -------
foo-2.2.26 Apache license
bar-7.999999 Donateware
baz_ware-20131209 MIT
quux-silly-6.5 BSD
It could be extended to the base system, but I’d like to see this in all the packaging systems as a common idea, in the same way that ‘info’ in a packaging command always shows what’s installed.
Links are a bit rushed this week cause I’ve been on the road, but here you go.
explainshell – help for arbitrary shell commands. It’s a really good idea, implemented in a pretty way. (via)
True X-Mouse Gizmo for Windows. I’m also saving this for later, just like the person who found this link.
From the same place: The ARPANET IMP Program: Retrospective and Resurrection. Recreating the entire Internet, when the Internet could be summed up as a list of 5-6 locations.
How ALL CAPS and punctuation is now used to communicate mood. Communication methods still tied down by ASCII, and then UTF-8.
I miss USENET. (via)
A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility. Watch the video at the end. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: There are more comics and illustrated works out there than there ever have been. A decade ago, I could buy a few art comics and a reprint each month and feel like I was keeping up. Now, it’s like a firehose of minicomic, self-published books, and prestige reprints that completely refreshes every week. The Comics Reporter 2013 Holiday Shopping Guide is huge but barely touches on it all. Read through and order something you aren’t familiar with; I can almost guarantee there’s several items in there you’ve never heard of.
Happy birthday to me!
- Is Your Stack Protector Working? On Undeadly, so it’s OpenBSD.
- ChaCha20 and Poly1305 in OpenSSH. (via)
- The next PC-BSD 10.0 image is available.
- Reid Linnemann is the latest in the Faces of FreeBSD series.
- NetBSD has updated file.
- FreeBSD’s iwn(4) driver has some updates (also in DragonFly).
- FreeBSD now has casperd, for controlling access to out-of-sandbox capabilities.
- FreeBSD’s oce(4) driver now supports 40Gb devices. (yay for manufacturer support)
- FreeBSD has Hyper-V drivers.
- OpenBSD’s ifconfig now shows the NWID, channel, and BSSID for IBSS networks.
- OpenBSD has updated to pixman 0.32.4.
- pkgsrc’s 2013Q4 freeze will start on the 16th.
- How old is who? (Don’t tell me 900 years.)
- There’s a broken builds list for pkgsrc-2013Q4 for anyone who wants to help.
- Hacker News had a link to the FreeBSD version of the BSD Family Tree, which is not unique, but the comments led to some interesting links, like this story of an 8-year NetBSD uptime.
- FreeBSDNews’s summary.
- All the AsiaBSDCon 2013 videos. (Last week’s link was just OpenBSD ones.)
- FreeBSD authentication against Samba 4 LDAP. I’m going to need this for the DragonFly machine I’m setting up in the same role at work… in my copious spare time.
No Starch Press noticed that I keep talking about Michael W. Lucas’s BSD-related books, and I’ve linked to Peteris Krumins’s catonmat site before, so they sent a copy of Krumins’s new “Perl One-Liners” book to me.
Here’s the hook for me: Perl was the first language I wrote a program of any real use in. Years ago, I had the Perl Cookbook. It was a pretty simple formula, where I’d have a problem. I’d look it up in the Perl Cookbook. If there was already a recipe that matched what I needed, I was set. I ended up having to stuff the book into a binder because the spine broke.
This reference is essentially what the Perl One-Liners book is, though this is less about programming and more about the solution you need right now. The book realizes this and it’s laid out like a menu. Flip through the index to find your problem, and then type the answer. The book even includes a link to a text file that you can copy down and grep for answers – I won’t link to it because it’s not mentioned on the author’s page, though he does include example chapters.
It’s not about learning Perl, and it’s not about technique – these are one-liners, after all. If you are doing the sort of thing Perl excels at, like text mangling, this will be a book full of tools for you. I think the author is going to continue in this style; he’s done a lot of one-liner articles and even some previous e-books.
Probably a good idea to make this disclaimer: As with other books, I get no reward for this review, unless you count me having another book in the house. That’s more of a problem than a benefit for me.
If you have a Hammer volume that is offline, meaning that you don’t have the pseudo-file-systems null-mounted anywhere, it won’t get cleaned up in overnight processing. You just have to manually specify it.
If you have a bge(4) network card and it’s giving you problems every time you configure it, there’s a fix on the way.
Rett Kent has volunteered for maintaining i386 support under dports. Good luck! 3rd-party software management is difficult.
This post from Konrad Neuwirth asking how to do a minimal installation of DragonFly led to this list of all the ‘knobs’ you can set to make your installation smaller, from John Marino. (And your buildworld faster, if that’s appealing to you.) I also pointed at rconfig and PFI, which are criminally underdocumented.
Now that I’m going into more descriptive detail with these, I’m going to try without the bullet points. It’s less of a Wall Of Text that way.
Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code. Really, very good advice. (via)
‘vr’ mentioned the Space Cadet and Symbolics Macivory keyboards in comments for last week’s Lazy Reading keyboard links. I didn’t know what they were, so searching around found me this Symbolics keyboard image (the model itself is apparently dearly missed)and the inevitable Wikipedia Space Cadet entry. I also found this study of keyboards that mentions some other ‘special’ modern models I’ve heard of in passing – Das Keyboard and Happy Hacking models.
Also found as part of that search: one man’s quest to get his own Lisp Machine. That appears to be about 10 years old, so my guess is that you’d go for emulation these days.
Sorting information that isn’t quite numeric. This bites everyone sooner or later.
The death and life of great Internet cities. “Whatever we may ultimately make of our move towards sites like Facebook, it’s almost certainly the case that, for the average netizen, it was a movement away from online literacy.” An excellent article about how communities are no longer built online – at least not through social networks. (via)
Farming hard drives: 2 years and $1m later. Data-driven analysis of hard drive prices, and how they’ve recovered poorly from the Thailand floods. I always like it when a company takes data from doing something on a large scale – something very few people are doing or could do – and releases it. (via)
Systems Software Research is Irrelevant. Rob Pike pointing out how the system ecosystem was becoming monocultural. It’s over 10 years old, so some of the problems have changed. The interesting thing is to look at it and see which parts were identification of upcoming trends. (via)
DragonFly 3.6 video review. This person doesn’t realize the shell is tcsh, not bash, and it really, really messes him up. I had to stop watching about 6 minutes in. (via blakkheim on IRC)
Your unrelated link of the week: The Church of the Subgenius is selling 2-for-1 deals on ordainment. It’s really a legal ordainment, too, at least in the U.S. You can perform weddings, funerals… circumcisions? Not sure about the legal restrictions on that, and maybe I don’t want to know. Anyway, you get an entertaining pack of literature which you can take either completely seriously, or not at all.
A lighter week for commits probably because of the U.S. holiday, but still plenty of things to link.
- Gabor Pali is this week’s ‘Faces of FreeBSD‘.
- The DiscoverBSD weekly BSD summary.
- There will be a FreeBSD Journal, though I see no mention on the Foundation site yet.
- There’s a ruBSD conference on December 14th, in Moscow. Undeadly has a page about it, and there’s the translation, if you feel lucky.
- BSDCan needs volunteers.
- Because FreeBSD is using the pre-GPL3 version of GCC, Google’s patches for Android (since that environment is apparently avoiding GPL3 too) have been brought in.
- FreeBSD has updated to svn 1.8.5.
- OpenBSD has updated NSD to 4.0.
- NetBSD has updated mpc. mpfr, and gmp.
- NetBSD has moved from pppd to ppp.
- FreeBSD is dropping 32-bit binary support, for reasons. But maybe not?
- Is it time to dump Linux and move to BSD? Yes, of course.
BSDNow 13 is out, and it includes an interview with Jordan Hubbard of ports/Apple/iXSystems fame. They also continue the ‘Building an OpenBSD router’ project, and of course, there’s more.
pkg 1.2 is coming out. This brings a number of new features, but as John Marino posted, you may want to delete your old pkg.conf to keep the new version from complaining about an old config file. This upgrade is a step on the way to signed packages, which is a Good Idea.
Remember the ‘mini roadmap’, mentioned last week yesterday? John Marino put together a Google Docs spreadsheet to track the task status; several items are already cleared off. Take a look and tackle a task.
John Marino posted a possible ‘roadmap’ for DragonFly, now that we’re past the 3.6 release. The thread went on for some ways as it was discussed, including my crazy ideas. Notably, several suggested items have already been tackled – an iwn(4) upgrade has already happened, and an update to bmake, based on John’s vendor branch update instructions.
This is a little old, but Matthew Dillon noted the status of his Hammer2 work a little while ago. Some highlights: he’s intending Hammer2 to be usable on a single host by the time of the next DragonFly release (summer 2014), the Summer of Code project for compression has already been integrated, and he listed different parts of the work that may be interesting for anyone wanting to chip in.
Slightly related: Matt posted some Hammer2 comments on the DragonFly 3.6 release story on Slashdot that may be interesting. Don’t bother reading the other comments; they’ll make your eyeballs bleed.