Julian Fagir has put together a graphical – meaning it works under curses in a terminal, or under X – interface to pkgin, the binary package manager. Can someone try it and describe how well it works?
Thanks to Sascha Wildner, the Areca RAID controller driver, arcmsr(4), now supports MSI. It should only make things better, but if it doesn’t, you can turn it off.
There’s several packages that will be removed from pkgsrc after the 2012Q2 branch, since they haven’t worked in a long time. Also, Python 2.4 has been removed from pkgsrc-current and 2.5 will go the same way before the end of the year.
The links are all over the map this week, which is fine. Enjoy!
- This makes me laugh every time. (via)
- Etsy has an astonishingly good internal development practice. And open source code? (via)
- For contrast, Facebook’s release engineering process. (via I lost it, sorry) Not as interesting but I can’t tell why.
- Mosh, a program designed for the persistence of screen but differently. (via) Dunno if it builds on DragonFly, but it looks neat.
- I’m getting more paranoid as I get older. Things like this Javascript ad injection on hotel wi-fi may be a reason. (via)
- “I just ran emacs. LOL!“
- 0x10c, a sci-fi game set in the future with spaceships running a 16-bit CPU. That you can program.
- I wish I could write here with the same mix of loathing and excitement found in this comics review. Warning: mildly… gonzo?
- The journey from user to contributor, a NYCBUG talk in mp3 form. (via)
- I’ve mentioned RetroBSD before, but here’s an example of it being installed on a Duinomite board. 2.11 BSD on a super-cheap, super-small Arduino-style board! (via) I don’t know what I’d do with it, but I want one. It even has keyboard and VGA ports.
- At some point, this CPU database will be handy. (via)
- A new, slow form of brute force ssh attack. (via) What I find interesting here is not so much the new attack itself, but Peter Hansteen’s careful gathering and analysis of data around it.
Your unrelated link of the week: memepool. It’s seen some activity lately. It was a blog before there were blogs, and I was part of it.
The next quarterly release of pkgsrc, pkgsrc-2012Q1, has been branched. I’ll start building binary packages momentarily.
The branch should show up in DragonFly git later today. Once available, you can change any references to ‘pkgsrc-2011Q4’ in /usr/Makefile to ‘pkgsrc-2012Q1’, and then to switch to it:
- cd /usr/pkgsrc
- git branch pkgsrc-2012Q1 origin/pkgsrc-2012Q1
- git checkout pkgsrc-2012Q1
- git pull
At that point, you can start building and installing newer applications. For more details on that, check the pkgsrc guide on the DragonFly website.
Note that you don’t have to do that; you can stick with the 2011Q4 (or earlier) packages you have installed now, if you don’t want to deal with software changes right now, or if you want to wait for the binary packages to become available. Upgrades/security fixes only happen for the latest quarterly release, though.
Note: don’t assume I tested this before advising you to do it, or anything like that. I mean, come on.
BSD Magazine’s April issue is out, and it’s about the Cloud. Or clouds, depending on how you look at it. Anyway, there’s several conversations in there about BSD-based hosting services, which I’m sure everyone has wished for at some time or another.
Steven Rosenberg is writing the longest DragonFly review ever. Here’s parts one, two, and three. There’s 3 more parts to come, 1 per day, so check back for the end of the story.
I have one trouble report. I need more, especially if you’re in Australia.
There’s been some discussion of packages that have been broken for a long time in pkgsrc, over on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list. It’s interesting to see just what breaks these packages, though it still seems up in the air whether any will be removed or not. (Follow the thread if you have time.) I don’t think the discussion has ended yet.
This would be the right time for an April Fools joke… but no. It’s so common it’s hard to come up with something that won’t make people roll their eyes.
- Here’s an Ultimate SSH Hacks article that isn’t actually that ultimate, or hacky. However, I found it via this Slashdot article that had a comment with this nifty trick for having a single-file Unix-portable ssh link.
- Design Disease. (via) I can sympathize. If you can’t tell what he’s objecting to in the pictures, consider yourself lucky. There’s probably a similar symptom that makes people collect old computer equipment, which I daresay a few readers are vulnerable to.
- Legit, Git workflow for humans. Slightly more sensical syntax for git, as far as I can tell. (via)
- Michael Lucas is dedicated to writing. Really dedicated.
- Also, Michael Lucas and The Value of Tech Books. He’s very right about man pages; they’re great and also not great.
- How DNS Changer was taken down and victims redirected. (via) I link to it because Paul Vixie, the author, also wrote the cron program you’re running right now. Really, look at the end of the man page.
- Look at what’s happened to DuckDuckGo’s traffic stats! (via) I’ve linked to the search engine before, and I know there’s at least a few readers who like it.
- “Let’s kill all proprietary drivers for good” (PDF, via several places) It makes me happy that it talks about drivers and acknowledges the existence of BSD. Driver unification would be great, though it really needs someone solidly behind it as with any project.
- “The problem is compounded by the way Linux has grown over the years into an ungainly edifice, built upon thousands of individual packages of computer code that have been stapled together.”
Your unrelated link of the day: a Space Shuttle launch from the point of view of the booster rocket. (via) Remember when humanity had reusable spaceships?
I’ve been working on a small house project over the past few days. My house has a basement workroom, which I use for whatever I need to do involving pliers or a saw. I’ve been slowly outfitting it over the past few years, and one thing I wanted to do was to wire it for music.
Not just a radio, but a computer that I could play sound file from, and stream audio. You can buy hardware for just that, but I’m cheap. I also wanted to keep it from looking like a computer desk; I have enough of that in my life already. This is a minor project; nothing like what you’d find on Instructables, but entertaining because it let me use DragonFly.
I purchased a set of cheap speakers from Newegg. You’ll notice that the speakers have a metal frame that forms a loop at the bottom – that’s important later. I bought the speakers and hooked to a tiny netbook, running DragonFly 3.0.2. It works fine for playing music, though the case speaker doesn’t shut off when external ones are attached. That’s not a problem here, though, since it’s not loud enough to be audible over the separate speaker output.
Those metal loops on the bottoms of the speakers turned out to be handy. I found some scrap wood, and built a small armature to fit inside the loop and hold it offset from the ceiling joist. Both of these wooden blocks could have the speaker slide over it, upside down.
I stained both of the blocks so that they wouldn’t stand out against the dark wood of the workroom ceiling.
I affixed the wooden hangers as far out as the cord on the speakers would let me, and slid the upside-down speakers onto them. There’s enough length in the cords to place the separate volume control dial on the workbench, and I’m done.
You can see the ceiling speaker in the upper corner. How’s the sound? Okayish. You aren’t going to get much out of a set of speakers this cheap, but at least I don’t have wires over my work area, and I don’t have to worry about puncturing a speaker with a screwdriver by accident, or something similar. I can close the laptop to keep it at least somewhat protected.
This is not a terribly complex project, but it makes me happy to have a DragonFly-based jukebox when I’m home. (This laptop usually travels with me.) I’m playing the music with mpg123, which is a surprisingly capable command-line player for files and for streaming audio.
(Yes, that is a large black velvet painting of a bullfight in the background. It was a wedding present. I also have black velvet paintings of Kenny Rogers as the Gambler, Fat Elvis, and Jesus blessing a tractor-trailer. I don’t know why.)
Sascha Wildner has updated mfi(4), the LSI MegaRAID SAS driver , via FreeBSD and LSI. SAS2208-based controllers are now supported.
I just removed old pkgsrc binary packages for DragonFly 2.6/2.7 from avalon, so if somehow you are running a version of DragonFly that old, and still using binary packages, you’ll want to upgrade. I’m pretty confident that describes nobody.
Also, I have plans for coordinating the next pkgsrc release of 2012Q1, due April 6th, with the probably next minor upgrade of DragonFly, 3.0.3. I wrote out my plans already, so go read. (plus followup)
John Marino has changed the default search path for ldconfig; it no longer looks along /usr/lib/gcc* since that’s already included via rpath. The end result: you will need to do ‘make upgrade’ after your next buildworld build/installworld.
I’ve seen a few people complain about poor video performance in DragonFly, in Xorg. If you see a bunch of “contigmalloc_map: failed …” errors in your dmesg, your video card needs more contiguous memory allocated. Set vm.dma_reserved to 32M in /boot/loader.conf and you should be set. If that doesn’t work, try 64M.
A torrent for DragonFly 3.0.2, found via Google search. Which ISO or img files does it include? I don’t know. Which architectures? I don’t know. Is it legit? I don’t know. Click at your own risk, just like any other link.
DragonFly 3.0.2 is out, and you can update (see /usr/src/UPDATING) an existing install or download a new one. This release turns off I/O APIC when booting in a VM because it caused issues for some users.
Student applications for Google Summer of Code (and DragonFly) can now be submitted, until April 6th. Now’s your chance!
This is the week of in-depth items to look at. I hope you have some time set aside… Also, I’m doing something a little different; since Lazy Reading articles are built up over the week, I’m scheduling it for early Sunday (EST) so that you can read it in your bathrobe, drinking an astonishingly large amount of tea. Or at least that’s what I’ll be doing.
- Apparently there’s a Russian version of BSD Magazine, with a special Russian-only article. Anyone who can read it willing to tell me what it’s about?
- Did you know BSD also stands for something bike-related?
- 70 Roguelikes! The 7-Day Roguelike Challenge, just completed, has 70 games out as a result. This will keep you busy, and there’s a very good writeup on several of the games to help you pick from the options.
- 20 Years of Adobe Photoshop. (via) I link it because almost everyone, sooner or later, has used it or has used a program with a very similar tool layout. Though I suppose you could argue it all comes from MacPaint, designed by Susan Kare, who happens to have also originated Clarus the dogcow. Moof!
- Man, Apple used to really have a sense of humor, too. Maybe they still do. Companies still do funny things (caution, autoplay video), but it seems to be done with the company’s marketing image in mind these days. Also, get your ball out of my yard you darn kids etc.
- Michael Lucas is teaching a SSH class at BSDCan 2012.
- Lucas also has also disclosed numbers on his recent self-publishing venture. I love seeing numbers like this because self-publishing discussion usually brings a whole lot of biases to the table, and people come down on one side or another because of what they want it to be, not because of what it is. (Like discussions of the music industry, piracy, and software.) This is just the plain numbers. Also, Absolute OpenBSD, second edition, is definitely his next book.
- Still on ssh, This Undeadly article talks about using OpenBSD, make, and ssh to speed up research.
- 20 iconic tech sounds bound for extinction. (via) Something in there will make you feel nostalgic. I like the 8mm film noise.
- Speaking of noise, here’s Famous Sounds, mostly electronically generated or sampled. (via) I guarantee some of these will be instantly familiar even though you won’t have heard the original song.
Your unrelated link of the week: Traitor. (via) It’s a Flash space shootemup game. But dragonflies show up in one part! (to shoot.)
Matthew Dillon has posted a link to the errata for the AMD CPU bug that he found. Venkatesh Srinivas has followed with a test case for the bug.
Matthew Dillon also pointed out there’s a workaround to fix it, with no performance impact, it’s only found on revision 10h CPUs (not Bulldozer), and it’s extremely hard to duplicate. Why draw such a heavy line under that? The news of this bug rippled out through various news sites and was almost universally misreported, in a way that made it look bad for AMD without actually realistically quantifying the problem. Remember, it took 6 months just to find it – and he was looking for it!