Ansible seems to be a configuration management system that’s lighter than puppet or salt. I had a student talking about it in my class tonight. BSD users Hubert Feyrer and Michael W. Lucas have both posted about it recently. Anyone want to repeat their experiences?
If you were perhaps thinking of setting up transmission-daemon, a BitTorrent server, this post on pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org will help you out.
If you have a sili(4) device, Francois Tigeot needs you to run a particular patch and tell him what happens. He’s testing a larger I/O request size, and wants to see how it will work out “in the field”.
Lots of links, not a lot of commentary, this week. Enjoy!
- What is your most productive shortcut with Vim? The first very extensive answer is actually all vi, not vim. (via)
- Found via previous link: vi / vim graphical cheat sheet.
- The site where that image site sells a vi emulator for Visual Studio/Word/Outlook. I can totally understand why you’d want that.
- Memory of a Broken Dimension, a game that starts as a command-line shell and breaks out into a 3D glitchy world. This is what Tron should have been. Mac/Windows only right now, unfortunately. (via)
- TCP Headers in Lego. (via)
- The History of ASCII art. (via)
- QWERTY, DVORAK, KALQ.
- Greytrapping.
- “Hey, a dot out!“
-
Futuristic User Interface 14: Primitive Computer Visualisation [sic]
Your unrelated link of the week: Baman Piderman. It’s a series of Youtube videos. Just… roll with it.
I’ve put the 3.4 release images up on terasaur, a Bittorrent seeding site. Please try pulling them and let me know how it goes. I haven’t torrented many things, so I am unsure how to even verbify “torrent’. Hopefully that sentence and those links work out.
I am somewhat entertained by Michael W. Lucas’s most recent blog post about IP Sets. This is mostly because, as he points out, he could use one pf config file across multiple machines and BSDs for network management, but has to fiddle with ipsets to get different Linux machines to match.
If you’re looking to install DragonFly on a Kimsufi server, and you can read French, this explanation may help you. (via Enjolras on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
If you’ve ever wondered about how you can resize/move a HAMMER filesystem, follow this thread for a variety of answers.
Have you ever wondered about how the booting process works on DragonFly? Well, Ivan Uemlianin did, out loud. Several different recommendations followed, so now you can learn too.
It’s been 2 years since the pkgsrc packages for DragonFly 2.12/2.13 were getting updated, so I am going to remove them. If you’re running DragonFly 2.12, you’ll want to either build from source or upgrade DragonFly.
‘william opensource4you’ posted a summary of the steps he took for setting up a DragonFly system with XFCE4, using dports. It’s pretty straightforward, and thanks to dport’s binary nature, should be exactly reproducible.
John Marino brought up a point every operating system project will have to think about: when does support for i386 (i.e. 32-bit x86 processors) stop? Follow the thread for details. There’s no final answer, yet.
As posted in my email to users@: Version 3.4 of DragonFly is officially out.
The release ISO/IMG files are all available at the usual mirrors:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/mirrors/
The release notes have details on all the changes:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release34/
If you are planning to try the new dports system for installing third-party software, check the DPorts Howto page:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/HowToDPorts/
If you have an installed DragonFly 3.2 system and you are looking to upgrade, these (not directly tested) steps should work, as root:
cd /usr/src
git fetch origin
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4
git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4
… And then go through the normal buildworld/buildkernel process found in /usr/src/UPDATING. If you are running a generic kernel, that can be as simple as
make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && make upgrade
(and then reboot)
If you encounter problems, please report them at bugs.dragonflybsd.org. I get better at testing for each release, but I also get better at discovering new problems just after release.
These are getting denser and denser with links, in part because I’m looking harder and in part because Hacker News is becoming a better and better source of links; there seems to be a new go-to site for tech links every 8-12 months. Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then Hacker News…
- Intel has published a HTML5 development environment. I don’t even know if it would work on DragonFly or even any BSD, but I feel efforts to make tools that are actually, genuinely, crossplatform should be looked at. Defensive platform-specific content seems to still be a thing.
- Slightly related: Building a Roguelike in Javascript. There’s several parts to this. (via)
- The Eternal Mainframe. The argument is a little wild-eyed, but the underlying thesis: “Cloud == Mainframe” is valid. (via)
- A Primer on IPv4, IPv6, and Transition. I signed up for an IPv6 tunnel recently, but I’m not directing traffic over it. I should be. (via)
- How to make Your Open Source Project Really Awesome. The title is linkbaity, but the steps listed are correct. You will look at the “If you want to completely screw your users…” notes and nod to yourself, recognizing something that bit you. (via)
- There’s still Apple ][ software being sold. I vaguely feel like I bought from there before… (via)
- Everything’s being put into a git repo these days. (via) Wait, spoke too soon. (thanks, ‘bla’ in comments)
- Scaling Pinterest. I like seeing what technology is used as a site transitions from “oh yeah, running on leftover hardware in my basement” to “we need to hire yet another person to keep this all running”. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Sometimes, repeated variations on a single theme can lead to some entertaining humor. Therefore, Dog Snack.
(Did I just sneak in two unrelated links? Yes I did.)
Are you using hotplugd? If you are, this post from ‘william opensource4you’ about a small patch he made may be useful to you.
John Marino has committed updates for libmpfr, diff utils, grep, and libexpat/libbsdxml. Libmpfr, the one item that I suspect doesn’t spring instantly to mind, is a library for floating-point computation.
As I described in a post to the kernel@ mailing list, the DragonFly 3.4 images are getting uploaded for mirroring and downloaded for testing. Assuming no surprises happen, we will be able to release very soon.
For those of us still on IPv4 networks, the BSD-specific OpenGrok site bxr.su should now be available in general, not just on IPv6.