Justin Sherrill – Page 205 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2012/07/122012/07/13

Do you use TeX?

I don’t, but I know there are people that do. That’s why I’m pointing out this discussion where it appears that TeXLive 2012 won’t support NetBSD, which may mean no DragonFly either. There’s the not-yet-packaged alternative kertex. TeXLive is in pkgsrc, so I don’t know if that means the package will be discontinued or just altered.

(Please correct me where I go wrong here; I’m not very familiar with this, but it sounds like a drastic enough change that it should be mentioned.)

Update: as several people pointed out, it’s just prebuilt binary versions that aren’t being provided upstream. The packages will all still be present in pkgsrc. So, no functional change for most everyone.

2012/07/12

Check your Samba version

… because versions 3.0 and 3.3 will be leaving pkgsrc soon-ish. You’d probably want to update anyway, but this is just in case you haven’t been upgrading too vigorously.

2012/07/11

A whole lot of updates

Peter Avalos has updated a bunch of third-party software: tcpdump, libpcap, libarchive, tnftp, xz, and OpenPAM. Thanks Peter! If you need more info on what these things are, the information is out there.

2012/07/10

Near NYC? See tmux

NYCBUG has a presentation tomorrow night titled “Bring a Box, Rock Your tmux(1)“, with Matthew Story. If you’re near the area, it’s worth seeing.

(posted for the benefit of the people who keep telling me “stop using screen and switch to tmux.”)

2012/07/10

gcc47 means gcc-aux for you

John Marino has added a ‘gcc47’ compiler ccvar, so you can build world and kernel with it. ‘It’ is actually gcc-aux, since it seems to work better than the basic (“vanilla”?) gcc47. You also get Ada support, though that wasn’t the driving reason to pick it. This is brand new so don’t try it unless you’re ready to discover issues.

Is there any other BSD able to use gcc 4.7 for world/kernel? Even 4.6? Most of the attention has been on clang.

2012/07/092012/07/10

Summer of Code status, week 7

Here’s the regular status updates for Mihai Carabas (scheduler) and Vishesh Yadav (inotify). ~~I don’t have the update from Ivan Sichmann Freitas yet.~~ Here’s Ivan Sichmann Freitas.

2012/07/082012/07/07

Lazy Reading for 2012/07/08

I think there’s a chance we’re about to see Microsoft start to slip downhill, in a way that may only be apparent a year from now if it continues. The company’s been a big moneymaker for years, but news items like the recent writedowns and my personal experience that they’re outsourcing license compliance checking makes me think that the rise of tablets and smartphones is cutting into their Windows/Office revenues like nothing ever has before.

It’s a guess, and it’s not likely that I’m right. If I am, it’s a seismic shift. Enough armchair theory! Here’s the links:

Some details on the creation of the Bitrig project. It’s mostly the drama side of the story, rather than the practical details. (via) The project appears to be backed by a commercial company, which is helpful.
“Get out of my way, window manager!” I don’t know if it’s any good, or evenif it works on DragonFly, but I like the name. (via)
Dru Lavigne, the driving force behind a lot of good BSD things, gets interviewed. (via)
Try Git in your browser.
Building the British countryside generator. Come for the concept, stay for the explanation of Voroni diagrams.
BSD 4.4 and IPv6, possibly mashed together. It’s kind of like making an all-electric Studebaker Land Cruiser, but worth it, in and of itself.
DragonFly developer Alex Hornung has a blog, and I didn’t realize it. There’s some interesting stories on crappy multimeters and keyboard repair. And software.
Hey, ADOM, which ceased development in 2002, is up as an Indiegogo project. It’s a very sophisticated roguelike, and it runs on DragonFly.
Can someone help this guy with his NFS question? Maybe it’ll get answered before this gets posted, if I’m lucky.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: The Whole Story. A comics collection, sort of like the ‘humble indie bundles’ for games, where if you pay a bit more, you get even more comics.

2012/07/07

Here’s a way to donate

If you want to put something towards DragonFly, and you don’t have time or hardware, cash is now an option. (It’s not tax-deductible.)

2012/07/06

Netgraph 7 work still going on

Nuno Antunes is still working on that netgraph upgrade. Among other changes, ng_tty has been added. What’s it do? Something with ppp, I think.

2012/07/06

July BSD Magazine out

July’s BSD Magazine has, among other things, an article from Michael W. Lucas along with a 30% off coupon for his Absolute FreeBSD book. There’s also an interview of Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo. Apparently DuckDuckGo uses FreeBSD? That’s good news.

2012/07/04

Visible capacitor failures

From a thread on users@, I bring you Visible Capacitor Failures. If the problems pictured are new to you… trust me, you will see them up close someday.

2012/07/04

More than you may want to know about BIOSes and partitioning

Someone trying DragonFly couldn’t get it to start, and appeared to have a confused disk. It looks like the system BIOS were at fault, and Matt Dillon has an explanation of this minefield. (Including some comments on 4k physical disk sectors.)

2012/07/03

igb(4) and MSI-X

Sepherosa Ziehau has added MSI-X support to igb(4), the Intel PRO/1000 gigabit network card. What does that mean? The commit message mentions a default transmit rate of 1.48Mpps small packets, which is good?

2012/07/03

GSoC updates, week 6

The usual weekly updates from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. Mihai has some interesting bugs found this past week by running his code on Matt Dillon’s 48-core system.

2012/07/02

Hardware reports given out

New company Gainframe is offering up OpenBSD dmesg/pcidump/usbdevs output for every system they build. I was originally going to link to this in a Lazy Reading entry, but then I realized it’s also a new company specializing in BSD-compatible hardware. Read the interview; I met Michael Dexter at the last NYCBSDCon and he is a decent guy.

We need more of this sort of specifically targeted work. Sites that rely on crowd-sourced contribution are good, but it’s not necessarily comprehensive, and you need a very large crowd for it to work.

2012/07/02

pkgsrc-2012Q2 released

The release announcement for pkgsrc-2012Q2 is out. New in this quarterly release: statistics about clang and pkgsrc. A surprisingly large number of packages build just fine with clang instead of gcc.

2012/07/012012/06/29

Lazy Reading for 2012/07/01

It’s summer, and I’m too warm. I’m whiny but still making with the links:

“The return of the FreeBSD desktop“, where Dag-Erling Smørgrav describes getting a BSD desktop working again due to a new ports system on FreeBSD. It’s still too messy a process to get to a GUI, I think, and to support that I’ll point at this post of a KDE developer giving up. (via) One of the issues is the rapid flux of the underlying systems X has to run on – something touched on before.
Here’s someone looking for a ‘Linux like BSD‘. Most of the answers are “then use BSD”, though the poster is hampered by the new Intel video chipset.
These “Ringbow” joystick controllers are described as being for games, but I think they could work as controllers like the Thinkpad nub. (via) It’s a Kickstarter project, so might be worth your money.
With some minor changes, this command could find you all the BSD-licensed items in pkgsrc, I think.
Phoronix thinks FreeBSD and Ivy Bridge don’t work together. I could have sworn I’ve already heard of Ivy Bridge systems running BSDs… Take it with a grain of salt.
Several readers will find the intext: Google search phrase incredibly useful. (via) Also, typing ‘*’ in Google Maps actually does what you’d expect.
Less is exponentially more, Rob Pike talking about Go. (via) The note about the Bell Labs numbering scheme explains a lot about UNIX’s terseness.
Visual Git Reference. (via) Showing a physical position to correlate with time is really helpful here.
A review of FreeBSD Device Drivers, the new No Starch book. Much of it should apply to DragonFly, I should think.
I suppose this Dwarf Fortress book was inevitable.

Your unrelated link of the day: The Kleptones are great, and this collection of the music that influenced Paul Simon’s Graceland is a wonderful find. A happier album I’ve never heard. I feel nostalgic for the days when you had to actually search for music.

2012/06/30

ixgbe(4) added

Francois Tigeot has added the Intel PRO/10GbE driver from FreeBSD, or ixgbe(4). A couple features are turned off, for now.

2012/06/30

BSDTalk 217 – Turning the tables

Will Backman, the usual interview in BSDTalk episodes, gets interviewed himself by Paul Schenkeveld, for 14 minutes.

2012/06/292012/06/29

Midterms coming up for GSoC

Attention students and mentors: the Summer of Code midterms open up on July 9th. This means students fill out an evaluation, and mentors also fill out an evaluation. Don’t forget, because completed evals from mentor and student both are necessary for a project to continue being funded.