The machines at dragonflybsd.org are now on a different part of the Internet, so if you were having problems connecting over the past few days, it should be better now. Matthew Dillon wrote up details of what he changed and why he changed it, including a note about future blade server plans.
I have reports from some people not being able to connect to the Digest, and others who can. If you can’t, please mail me a traceroute. I thought it was from me messing with pf, but perhaps not…
Pierre Abbat noticed that when using pkg_rolling-replace, his Python packages would fail to be built/replaced. This is because pkgsrc puts the version number into the name of the package, and he was moving from Python 2.6 to 2.7. OBATA Akio and Greg Troxel had suggestions/explanations.
Added: Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to version 1.0.1d – see the changelog.
Removed: support for ISA sound cards, by Sascha Wildner. Goodbye sb16; I’ll remember you fondly.
It’s announced! If DragonFly is going to participate again for the sixth year in a row (wow!), we need mentor volunteers…
Matthew Dillon is moving dragonflybsd.org’s network link to a new VPN today. (It may have already happened; I only just read the email.) This may help the people that have reported their network path to dragonflybsd.org seems to die somewhere in the Cogent network…
Or is it ‘statii’? English is wonderfully inconsistent. Anyway, Michael W. Lucas has posted an update on his two upcoming publications: the second edition of Absolute OpenBSD and DNSSEC Mastery. Both are in progress, and you can download the ‘pre-release’ version of DNSSEC Mastery now.
For once, I didn’t accidentally post this too early. I hope you have some spare time; there’s a lot of meaty links this week.
- “Keep the workload off the pinkies.” is a good recommendation for any keyboard layout. (via)
- Dan Langille started doing some price comparisons for various hard drives; see the comments on his article for some specialty sites that do the same.
- “It was open source because we didn’t have any choice.” Spacewar, the first computer game. Or at least the first computer game like we’d expect it to be.
- If you read the details, Ethernet and Microsoft Word came from almost the same place. (via)
- YouCompleteMe, a Fast, As-You-Type, Fuzzy-Search Code Completion Engine for Vim. (via) Haven’t tried it.
- This article about the correct pronounciation of “GIF” is mostly a historical rehash, but I really like the last two sentences.
- This Wired article does a good job of describing what’s special about Flickr compared to all the other big photo services, and also has an excellent metaphor for Facebook buried in there. (via)
- This is perhaps one of the better descriptions of being a “nerd” and how it has changed recently.
- Well, that’s a bizarre translation. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- My favorite part of this excellent Economist article about Voyager 1 and 2 is this note: “Most ingeniously of all, Dr Stone’s team equipped the probes with an advanced bit of hardware called a Reed-Solomon encoder. […] The rub was that in 1977 a way to decrypt Reed-Solomon corrected data had yet to be worked out. Luckily, by the time Voyager 2 reached Uranus in 1986, it had been.“
- An HTML5-based roguelike. I’m sure there’s others. I like that HTML5 is starting to make things Just Work. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Anthony Clark of Nedroid.com is selling his sketchbook; 101 pages as a digital download, for $1. Look at his strip or his Tumblr doodles if you want to know more before, but that’s quite a deal. Nedroid is the source of one of my favorite character names: Beartato. Also makes a good shirt.
The emx(4) driver now has support for multiple TX queues, but it’s not on by default. There’s scenarios where multiple queues work out with that hardware, but you have to be sure you are actually in the right setup for that first. Check Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit message for the details.
Sepherosa Ziehau has merged the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for em(4) and igb(4), along with updating em(4)/emx(4) to version 7.3.4 and igb(4) to version 2.3.7.
It was planned some time ago, but versions of Samba older than 3.5 are now out of pkgsrc, and version 3.5 will hopefully be replaced by 4.0 soon. Ruby 3.0 and 3.1 will also be going soon.
DragonFly didn’t participate this year, but it’s worth looking at the winners of the Google Code-In work for 2012 – there’s two people that were working on NetBSD in there.
John Marino has set gcc 4.7 as the default compiler in DragonFly. This replaces the previous default of gcc 4.4. The 4.4 version is still available, and while you can set NO_GCC44 to keep it from being built, John’s commit message notes that it’s still useful especially for some ports that don’t work with gcc 4.7.
Remember I mentioned FOSDEM a few days ago? The X.Org presentation slides are up, and the mostly-about-BSD “The future of X.org on non-Linux systems” presentation slides are included.
If you have git installed, and you are trying to upgrade it, you may have problems. The scmgit-docs package dependency requires some DocBook files that aren’t always accessible. If you do run into this problem, there’s 3 separate options:
- You can just install scmgit-base and ignore scmgit-docs. The program ‘git’ still runs.
- You can download the prebuilt DocBook files separately.
- You can rebuild some XML-related dependent files and then rebuild without issue.
Hubert Feyrer wrote a review of Ansible 0.9, a management tool for multiple systems, similar to Puppet or maybe Chef. Just after doing that, Ansible 1.0 came out, with support for pkgsrc via pkgin-installed packages. This is the first solution (that I know of) that supports pkgsrc package management for multiple systems.
For once, I got to read the commit logs for other BSDs…
The OpenBSD ‘Papers’ page has some videos listed to match the OpenBSD-related presentations from EuroBSDCon 2012.
Not only does NetBSD support the BeagleBoard, but Michael Lorenz is committing from it.
FreeBSD has brought in a new version of bmake and jemalloc. I’ve seen a number of other commits recently attributed to ‘NetApp’, which is good to see. Also, preliminary USB support for boot loaders.
PC-BSD is looking to use pkgng, the same binary package manager used in John Marino’s DPorts. It’s proving quite popular.
Sepherosa Ziehau has posted a detailed message showing the speeds he gets with multiple transmission queues, using igb(4). The short version:
Quick summary, the multiple TX queue support gives me: +200Kpps for 2 bidirectional normal IP forwarding (now 4.40Mpps) +160Kpps for 2 bidirectional fast IP forwarding (now 5.23Mpps)
No theme evolved this week, but that’s OK.
- Here’s a good coincidence: I already had a link to post from Ycombinator about the rather scary Ken Thompson compiler hack. Note that the Ycombinator answers are generally, “Nah, this hack is extremely unlikely to happen.” Except Christian Neukirchen happened to note separately that this really happened as recently as 2009, with Delphi.
- This poster doesn’t understand that “removing the license” is not a legitimate use of BSD-licensed code.
- That crazy anti-BSD ranter on phoronix is getting a fan club – just what every troll desires, unfortunately.
- OpenBSD is actually looking at paring down ports, which makes sense when you read why.
- LearnYouAHaskell.com – a free tutorial on the programming language Haskell. It’s entertainingly written. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Javascript is the new Perl. I can see that. (via)
- Courier Prime, a new version of the ‘traditional’ Courier monospace font. (via) Reading about Courier Prime to the end leads to a mention of Inconsolata as a good ‘coding’ font. Anyone tried it? Sans-serif monospace fonts are the most subtle way you can make your xterm look modern, I think. Update: Thomas Klausner just added courier-prime to pkgsrc, so you can try it now. Inconsolata is already there.
- Who hasn’t thought about doing this with the computers in their house, really?
- “Storyboard was born of my insane desire to consume videos without actually having to watch them.“
- A modem from the 1960s, communicating. I’d like this even if it didn’t work; the box is nice. I remember watching text scroll on screen like that with a 1200-baud unit. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Related to that: The sound of the dialup, pictured. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: MeTube: August sings Carmen ‘Habanera’. Might be NSFW, probably will make you mildly confused or uncomfortable. Here’s the ‘making of’ video which is all in German, I think. If that’s too much, try a recent Cyriak-animated video. I never thought I’d recommend a Cyriak video as the less disturbing thing to watch.
GCC version 4.7 is already available now in DragonFly 3.2, but it’s not the default compiler. John Marino intends to make it default for the next release. What’s that mean for us? Nothing other than a new compiler, since he’s already fixing related issues.