The initial download of pkgsrc via Git on DragonFly is a little bit faster now, with the ‘make pkgsrc-create-shallow’ option recently added by John Marino. Note that there’s a similar option for src. It skips downloading file history.
Sascha Wildner has added system management BIOS (SMBIOS) support, visible with kenv, from FreeBSD. Use it for getting things like the BIOS revision, system manufacturer, and so on. For example:
smbios.bios.reldate="12/04/2006" smbios.bios.vendor="Dell Inc. " smbios.bios.version="2.1.0 "
This may seem minor, but this can be very helpful when dealing with hardware you aren’t physically able to access.
Apparently this is history week for Lazy Reading.
- You know what I like about older retail games? Not the playing, but the paraphernalia that came with it – maps, histories, stories on printed paper. This Empire for Apple ][ description even has pictures of a hand-drawn timeline.
- Remember when Enlightenment was considered too graphically intensive to run easily? Now E17 is in alpha! (via multiple places including here.)
- The regular expression that’s the equivalent of a shrug and a handwave.
- “Why BSD is better than Linux” (2002). It’s an old PDF presentation, but a good history overview. I got a kick out of slide 40.
- Rob Pike on why object-oriented programming isn’t always awesome. Slightly related: I wish Google+ pages had RSS feeds. (via)
- The GPL is usually described as a defense for users against companies. What if it’s being used as a bludgeon by one company against another?
- Remember in last week’s Lazy Reading, I pointed at complaints about Linuxisms; changes that assumed Linux was the only Unixlike system. The problem continues even within distributions. There’s a common thread of the people involved.
- When In Git, different animated gifs set to different git habits and events. This is the next stage after rage comics.
Your unrelated link of the week: The Useless Web. Random single-purpose sites, and oddly compelling. (via)
Because of the recent good results for pgbench on DragonFly 3.2, Phoronix has a new benchmark of DragonFly using other (possibly unrelated) tests. There’s not a lot of information to glean from them; they are testing operations different than what was optimized for pgbench in 3.2. I’d like to see DragonFly 3.0 tested the same way to see how much improvement there was between versions.
While we’re talking about cross-pollination of BSDs: going by licenses, there’s some DragonFly code in the iPhone – at least the fairq scheduler. (Noted by several people on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
A person labeled only as ‘wicked’ sent me a link to this conversation about BSD unification. I’ve seen the topic brought up before, and I’d argue that it’s already happening, slowly. DragonFly has code brought in from FreeBSD, pkgsrc from NetBSD, pf and dhclient from OpenBSD, etc. ‘bmake’ is used in NetBSD, FreeBSD, and DragonFly now. Clang works across the board, I think (dunno the status on OpenBSD). There’s more of that cross-pollination going on if you think about it.
We (as in DragonFly) are not participating in Google Code-In this year, but I’m happy to see there’s another BSD in there – NetBSD. (There’s only 10 participating organizations, so it’s not easy.) Look at their page if you’re in the right age range to do projects.
MaheshaDragonFlyBSD, a ‘liveUSB’ distribution of DragonFly with software preinstalled, has been updated to run using DragonFly 3.2.1 as a base. The linked page contains screenshots and a description of what comes out-of-the-box. (mentioned previously here.)
The 3.2 release seems to have gone well. Who has tried the new USB support? I’m curious to see how it’s going.
- :syntax Off, about working without syntax highlighting. (via)
- The previous link led me to this .vimrc with by-line explanations. I never get tired of looking at these things, though I also never implement anything out of them.
- 102 FreeBSD Tips. It’s really the contents of the FreeBSD fortune file. Almost all these tips apply to DragonFly, too, and often the other BSDs.
- A tcpdump primer. Always a good tool to know. It’s not as easy to use as Wireshark, but it’s certainly possible to end up with access to tcpdump and not Wireshark, right when you really need to see what’s happening on the network. (via)
- An HTML5-based terminal in your browser. Displays images, runs vim, etc. All that technological growth since 1972 has come full circle to replicate an 80×25 screen again. (I kid; it’s pretty neat.)
- A 6-week cryptography course, free of charge.
- Nothing to do with this operating system, but: Robot DragonFly, an Indiegogo project. (via)
- When you’re young and getting paid to work on open source, you can be surprisingly naive. (via several people)
- I agree with this sentiment about Linuxisms coming from an OpenBSD developer. (via Tomaz Bodzar)
- Someone want to work on ssh-ldap-helper for BSD? It sounds like a very good idea.
- A bunch of free computer books. Ignore the Linux ones; there’s free books for Ruby/Python/Perl there. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: This roundup of ultrarealist human sculpture. You’ve probably seen Ron Mueck‘s art before, at least.
Sepherosa Ziehau is switching a number of network cards over to use ifpoll, which means they will have capabilities similar to MSI-X, even if the network card doesn’t support it. My suspicion is that it will make these cards perform better in busy situation where they would otherwise get bogged down… but that’s based on hunch rather than empirical testing. As Sepherosa Ziehau pointed out, it certainly can’t hurt.
November’s PDF issue of BSD Magazine is out, with a number of articles including a hardware review of the Netgear Universal Wifi Adapter. We need more BSD-centric device testing.
On the 10th of November, I’m going to remove the binary pkgsrc packages from mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org for DragonFly 2.8 through 2.11. They are closing in on 2 years old at this point, and are from a pkgsrc branch that hasn’t been updated for that long.
If you are actually using version of DragonFly that old, you can continue building from pkgsrc normally; these are just prebuilt packages.
Today is the day that FreeBSD moves to using clang by default. This is not necessarily a surprise, but I like the finality of calling it “Clang-Day”. I think Clang will probably be the next compiler brought into DragonFly’s base system, instead of the next release of gcc. Don’t make any bets on my statement, though, cause I certainly won’t be the one doing it. (It’s hard.)
I’m glad 3.2 is out the door. I think I spent more time on release notes and watching package builds than any other release.
- This in-browser recreation of an Apple ][+ is a trip down nostalgia lane. (via)
- HappyEdit, “Vim-based” text editor. It’s actually an IndieGoGo project. (via)
- A physics paper with a description of a non-Euclidean universe, which happens to mention Cthulu. (via)
- NetBSD now supports these 100-core Tile-GX processors; I didn’t know such hardware existed. (Thanks, Tomas Bodzar)
- Active vs. Passive Benchmarking. (Tomas again.)
- The Search for the Ultimate Engineer’s Pen. I like looking at some of the pen models mentioned. The best way to find the “ultimate” pen, that nobody mentioned: go into a good art store and ask to sample a few pens. Bring the type of paper you normally use. Pens are usually out loose, and having it in your hand is the best way to tell. If there’s a college near you with a good technical art program, check the campus store. Why, yes, I did base that example on direct experience.
- The evolution of the computer keyboard. The descriptions of the various mechanisms are neat to hear about. It of course repeats the Dvorak story. (via)
- All the back issues of science fiction magazine Omni, online and free.
Your unrelated link of the day: Sir, You Are Being Hunted. I link to the Kickstarter for this game for no other reason than I think it would be fun to play.
Every year, the Chaos Communication Congress tends to gather at least a few DragonFly-using people, and this year is no different. The event is being held in a much larger arena this year, in Hamburg, Germany, so there’s a good chance a DragonFly ‘assembly‘ could be held. Speak up on the users@ mailing list, or EFNet #dragonflybsd, if you’re going too. It’s happening on the last few days of this year, December 27th through 31st.
I’ve written a release email that includes the steps for updating from source and updating pkgsrc for existing installs. This release enjoys better performance and new packages, so go, enjoy.
There was one more file to change for the bmake import, so if you are running DragonFly 3.3 and updated between the 28th and 30th of October, do a full rebuild.
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSH in DragonFly to 6.1p1. This looks to be a bugfix release, but check the changelog for details.
I mentioned this before in the Lazy Reading from last Sunday, but it’s worth a second look: Apple’s new Fusion Drive product appears to be very much like DragonFly’s swapcache. DragonFly doesn’t have exclusive right to the idea of caching on a faster disk, clearly, so I’m not complaining that it’s “ours”. It’s frustrating to see product announcement/press releases stumbling all over this like it’s a new thing.
Then again, having new ideas about technology ideas and making sure they spread is one of the points of the BSD license, so perhaps there’s no good reason to complain at all.
(Before anyone reads too much into this: No, I don’t know of any direct relationship between swapcache and Fusion Drive; they may have no common background other than structure.)
I lost Internet access because of Hurricane Sandy, and couldn’t get my machine to recover until I power cycled. I think it’s because my external IP changed, and pf doesn’t seem to handle that well for NAT or just in general. The recommended fix, putting the interface name in parentheses, doesn’t seem to work. Anyone have advice?